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Microsoft Outlook and Teams Outage May Be Over
· Confirmed
In Short: Al Jazeera noted that the outage affected Microsoft 365 services used by global businesses, institutions, and individuals, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, its artificial intelligence tool.
LIVE: Global Microsoft Outage Leaves Millions Without Access To Outlook Email, Teams And Other Tools. Gage Goulding
Microsoft said its popular email and other services were improving but not fully restored more than 24 hours after a mass outage disrupted communications worldwide, according to Al Jazeera. The outage, which began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday, affected users in 74 countries, with overloaded servers becoming unexpectedly available, the company reported.
Al Jazeera noted that the outage affected Microsoft 365 services used by global businesses, institutions, and individuals, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, its artificial intelligence tool. While Microsoft has not specified how many people were affected, the company announced in January that it had more than 450 million Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers.
Cnbc reported that Microsoft issued an apology Friday for the wide-ranging outage that shut down Outlook and other Microsoft 365 products, as the company worked to restore service nearly 24 hours after connectivity problems began. The company said the outage was caused by a bug introduced during a network capacity upgrade, according to Fox Business.
The New York Times reported that Microsoft is seeing widespread improvements to its services after a global outage took them offline on Thursday, disrupting communications and work at schools, government agencies, and offices around the world.
Al Jazeera and The Guardian both reported that the outage affected foreign banks and financial institutions in Taiwan especially hard, as their data is emailed to overseas headquarters through Microsoft’s systems. The Guardian also noted that the outage hit UK hospitals, GPs, schools, and police.
Microsoft said it saw “encouraging recovery progress,” with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure. Al Jazeera added that email queues were significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.
The outage was not a cyber-security incident and was caused by a technical issue. Microsoft said it was deeply sorry for the disruption and that it takes its responsibilities extremely seriously.
The disruption began at 11:17am US Eastern Time, about 3:17am AEDT, according to Microsoft incident logs republished by the University of Pennsylvania's Microsoft incident reports page.
The outage was a stark reminder of how much firms rely on digital systems like Microsoft Outlook to keep their operations running.
The outage affected Microsoft 365 services used by global businesses, institutions, and individuals, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, its artificial intelligence tool.
The outage was not a cyber-security incident and was caused by a technical issue.
Background
A Microsoft outage affecting over 430 million users worldwide has raised concerns about reliance on major tech firms.
What's confirmed
- Microsoft reported that “email queues [are] significantly reduced and approaching normal levels”.
- Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
What's still developing
- As we reported in our Outlook outage coverage, Downdetector reports previously surged past 110,000.
Sources
- Al Jazeeralink
- BBClink
- CBS Newslink
- Cnbclink
- Fox Businesslink
- Human Resources Directorlink
- MacRumorslink
- Mashablelink
- Soapcentrallink
- Technologymagazinelink
- The Guardianlink
- The Indian Expresslink
- The New York Timeslink
- The Vergelink
- WIREDlink
- Windowsreportlink
- Gage Goulding — video link
- CBS News Sacramento — video link
- ABC7 — video link
- The Pip Brief — video link
- Gage Goulding — video link
- ABC 7 Chicago — video link