Microsoft scrambles to fix global Outlook outage as users face disruption - IOL

Microsoft's global outage disrupted access to Outlook, Teams and Copilot, leaving businesses, government departments and individual users struggling to access key services.

Microsoft was struggling to restore its Outlook services on Thursday as a major global outage disrupted email access and other products, with the company admitting that its repair efforts were not progressing as expected.

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

The impact of the outage was 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.

"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.

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 affected 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 applications 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 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 continued 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, 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.