A global outage affecting Microsoft 365 has been disrupting Outlook, Teams, and other services for over twelve hours. In addition to individual users , banks, government agencies, and courts in numerous countries have been affected. Microsoft has not yet identified a clear path to recovery but has ruled out a cyberattack.
The problems began Thursday evening. Microsoft initially cited connectivity issues in North and South America, but that explanation did not hold up. According to Downdetector, reports started coming in from 74 countries and regions within about an hour. At its peak, there were nearly 140,000 reports.
In addition to Outlook and Teams, OneDrive, Exchange Online, SharePoint, and Copilot are also experiencing issues. Users are unable to log in, send or receive emails, or start Teams meetings. The outage has now lasted well over twelve hours, much longer than more common issues, which are typically regional in nature.
Servers are going down one by one
Microsoft has not yet officially explained exactly what went wrong. In any case, it is not a cyberattack. “I can confirm that there are no indications that this is the result of malicious activity or cyber activity,” said Charles Lamanna, EVP of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft. Australian Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft is considering a scenario similar to the one involving CrowdStrike in 2024: an update that went wrong and spread rapidly.
The likely cause according to some sources lies in the automatic health checks of Microsoft servers. A recent change to a server component reportedly caused servers that failed those checks to automatically become unavailable as a standard security measure. This overloaded the remaining infrastructure.
Microsoft restarted servers, rerouted traffic, and strategically blocked certain data flows that were placing additional strain on the infrastructure. That only helped to a limited extent. “We’re seeing partial recovery in regions where we’ve implemented these adjustments, but that isn’t leading to a sustainable recovery,” the company reported.
Government officials turn to paper
The consequences are widespread and vary by region based on time zone. In Japan, government employees are making paper copies of documents because ministries were unable to send emails for virtually the entire day on Friday. In Australia, schools, courts, the federal police, and the intelligence service were affected by the outage. The Philippine Supreme Court also warned of delays. The American EV manufacturer Workhorse postponed its earnings call until Monday.
Banks such as Standard Chartered and ING Australia are also warning about scammers posing as help desk representatives.
Microsoft 365 does experience glitches from time to time, but an outage like this rarely affects the entire world and rarely lasts this long. Last October, for example, there was an outage that lasted about 4 hours.