Microsoft battling to fix global Outlook outage

WASHINGTON (UNITED STATES) - Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to repair a major outage of Outlook were not going as expected and the firm was seeking alternative solutions as users around the world were left without its crucial services.

The hours-long disruption, which Microsoft attributed to "elevated load" on its infrastructure, has hit email, as well as products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.

The impact of the outage has been felt globally, with users ranging from companies to governments reporting that they were unable to communicate via Outlook.

"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," Microsoft said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

"We're identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity," the tech giant added, without saying when service was expected to be fully restored.

Charles Lamanna, EVP of Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, stated, “We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue. We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”.

The disruption went global within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported.

A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

One of the impacted countries was New Zealand, where the foreign ministry sent a notice saying its "ability to receive emails has been affected by the global Microsoft outage. This also impacts all New Zealand Embassies, Consulates and Representative Offices around the world."

Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas", but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected "Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region".

Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes popular apps such as Outlook and Teams.

"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company wrote on X.

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it added.

Downdetector, which tracks online outages, showed a sharp decline around 0450 GMT (11.50am Thailand time)  in users' reports of disruptions in Washington and Hong Kong.

Thousands of users also reported issues with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector.

As the outage dragged on for hours, Microsoft posted a series of updates on X, detailing continued but unsuccessful efforts to restore full service.

In one update shortly after 6pm Eastern Time (6am Thailand time), Microsoft said it was "observing limited recovery" as it sought to route user traffic away from affected servers.

"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," the company added.