Breaking: Microsoft platforms suffering widespread outages, including Outlook - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

More than 120,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook. (Reuters: Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo)

Widespread outages are affecting Microsoft platforms, with reports of issues around the world. 

The company has confirmed a large number of its servers are unexpectedly unavailable, triggering the outage. 

OpenAI and Anthropic say they have also identified issues with their Microsoft connectors.

A widespread outage has hit Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, with many users having trouble accessing their email accounts and encountering other errors across the tech giant's suite of apps.

As of about 4:30am AEST, more than 120,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook, with many saying they could not send or receive emails or were experiencing delays.

On Microsoft's Service Health Status site, the company confirmed users may be unable to connect to multiple 365 services, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365 and Defender XDR.

"We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure," the status update said.

"We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service." 

Microsoft has paused all deployments, is moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and is restarting affected servers to return them to service, the company said.

My Telstra is also suffering an outage, with the telco's website saying the service "isn't available right now". 

"We're working hard to solve the problem and get all the great My Telstra services back online as soon as we possibly can."

The ABC has contacted Telstra to confirm whether the outage is related to Microsoft servers.

OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may 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.