Microsoft outage: Millions affected as company scrambles to restore Outlook and Teams
The icons for a range of Microsoft apps, including Microsoft Outlook, on the desktop of a laptop. Picture: Yui Mok/Press Association
Microsoft is scrambling to fix an outage affecting some of its systems, causing major disruption for users, organisations and businesses around the world.
In its latest update, the tech company said it was seeing “early signs of stabilisation” as it worked to increase capacity and allow more users to regain access to its services. The global outage has affected millions of users for more than 12 hours across Thursday and Friday.
In an update shortly after 11am Irish time, Microsoft said: “We’ve made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region.
“Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues.”
The disruption appears to be patchy, with some, but not all, users reporting problems with services including Microsoft Teams and Outlook email.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, while more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Copilot, Microsoft's AI chatbot, according to the company.
Microsoft said there were no indications that the outage had been caused by a cyber-attack.
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Earlier, the company said it was seeing only “marginal success” in its efforts to restore its systems fully. It said a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load”, which was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”.
The company determined that a number of servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” because of a problem that caused them to fail during automated checks.
It had also warned that services that had restarted could become unresponsive again once they began receiving traffic.
“Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defence-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report,” Microsoft said.
The outage-monitoring website Down Detector recorded a rise in reports of Microsoft 365 problems at about 6pm GMT on Thursday, with nearly 130,000 reports across 74 countries. The disruption affected access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Copilot was also affected.
Microsoft has suggested the outage may have been caused by problems with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 running.
Microsoft executive vice-president of Copilot Charles Lamanna posted on X that the company would share more information when it became available.
“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” he said.
The Microsoft outage also affected connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic's AI services.
OpenAI said it was investigating a problem with Microsoft connectors, which meant new connections could be broken and tools were not working as expected.
Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The Microsoft outage has also disrupted services across Ireland, with the HSE warning of delays to emails and intermittent problems with video conferencing.
Healthmail, the HSE’s national secure clinical email service, has become unavailable. The HSE said it had agreed alternative arrangements with the IMO, ICGP and IPU for prescriptions under the GMS scheme while the issue is being resolved.
The Department of Social Protection said welfare payments would not be affected, although responses to service queries could be delayed. An Garda Síochána said there had been “no impact on operational policing”.
Cork City and County Councils also reported disruption. Cork City Council said several systems, including email, had been affected, with its ICT team working on temporary solutions.
Cork County Council warned that members of the public might have difficulty contacting the local authority or accessing online services. However, its phone lines remained operational.
The UK Government said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, adding that there were “robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption”.
The outage has affected businesses and organisations around the world that rely on Microsoft products.
With the NHS email system disrupted, pharmacies reported problems communicating with some GP surgeries about prescriptions, leading to “significant” waiting times for medicines.
Several UK police forces urged people not to report crimes online and to contact them by phone instead.
Some schools in the UK told parents that services such as email and Teams were unavailable, and that attendance or absence issues had to be reported by phone.
National Rail, which provides information across the UK network, warned that people might be unable to access tickets sent to them by email.
Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services had been affected, while Taiwanese security firms, life insurers and investment trust companies reported disruption to fund management services.
In financial markets, some portfolio managers were unable to check emails, making it difficult to access some trading platforms.
In Japan, shipping company Sagawa Express said it could not accept online reservations for some of its services at airports and train stations. Pharmaceutical company Taisho said it had to handle orders by phone.
Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform, which affected a range of productivity software and industries worldwide.
Mark Gregory, an associate professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University in Melbourne, said the outage appeared to be affecting the network layer in Microsoft's systems. He said it could be similar to the configuration issue that brought down Optus's network in 2023.
He said configuration problems affecting some servers meant customers were forced to share a smaller pool of servers to access cloud services.
“If you lose part of that pool, then all of the users are trying to access the remaining servers, and that overloads them. And then they go down. And so you end up with a cascading problem. Then it takes time to find the underlying problem, in this case, a misconfiguration in the network layer.”
Gregory said businesses reliant on cloud services such as Microsoft 365 should have back-up options.
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