Microsoft 365 Outage Hits Outlook and Teams Across Dozens of Countries
A Microsoft 365 outage that began Thursday is still disrupting Outlook, Teams and Copilot worldwide, including UK police, GPs and pharmacies.
A large Microsoft 365 outage that began on Thursday was still disrupting email and other services around the world on Friday, hitting government agencies, courts, health services and businesses in multiple countries, according to the BBC and Al Jazeera. Microsoft says it has seen some progress but has given no timeline for full recovery.
What happened
Problems with Outlook, Microsoft’s email service, were first reported at around 16:00 GMT on Thursday, Al Jazeera reported. Within about an hour, the outage-tracking site Downdetector had logged user reports from 74 countries and territories. Downdetector counts user-submitted reports, so it does not measure how many customers were actually affected. By about 07:00 GMT on Friday it showed at least 43,000 Outlook reports from 72 countries, a figure Al Jazeera said probably undercounts the real total.
Microsoft said Microsoft 365 services, including Teams and its Copilot AI software, were experiencing “connectivity problems,” as reported by the BBC. Outlook was hit hardest, with users unable to reach mailboxes by web, app or phone and many messages arriving late. Teams chats and calls have largely kept working, Al Jazeera reported. Services from other companies that connect to Microsoft, including OpenAI and Anthropic, also reported problems.
After more than 12 hours, Microsoft described its progress as “marginal success,” according to Al Jazeera, and said it was checking that patches worked after infrastructure reboots. Al Jazeera also reported that servers that had been restored were failing again on Friday morning in Europe.
Public services affected
In the UK, GP surgeries, police forces and pharmacies were among the services affected, the BBC reported. Some GPs asked patients not to submit messages through their websites, and several police forces asked the public to phone rather than report incidents online. UK members of parliament lost access to Microsoft products through their parliamentary accounts, and Parliament said it was working with Microsoft to resolve the matter as quickly as possible.
Elsewhere, the BBC reported that Japan’s shared government IT platform was disrupted, and Masanao Ozaki, Japan’s deputy chief cabinet secretary, said Tokyo understood Microsoft was working to restore services. Some Singapore government systems and the Supreme Court of the Philippines were affected, and in Australia the domestic spy agency ASIO and the federal police were hit. Mike Burgess, ASIO’s director-general, said the impact was mainly on email. In the US, the City of Austin said employees could not send or receive email, though phone lines and 911 were unaffected. Euronext, the European stock exchange operator, told listed companies to use the phone for corporate communications, according to Reuters as cited by the BBC.
Some essential services were not disrupted. Emergency services in Singapore remained fully operational, and Unity Health Toronto, which declared an infrastructure-failure alert, said patient care was not affected.
What is known about the cause
Microsoft has not published a root cause. A Microsoft executive said there was no indication the outage resulted from malicious or cyber activity, according to Al Jazeera. Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft told him it did not believe a cyberattack was involved.
Al Jazeera reported that Microsoft said affected infrastructure had elevated load across several regions and that some servers became unexpectedly unavailable, and that the load was not caused by a rise in traffic. Microsoft was also rolling back a network change on Friday but did not say whether that change was responsible. Outside analysts quoted by Al Jazeera offered theories, including a faulty internal update or a cascade in which failing servers push traffic onto others, but these are unconfirmed.
What comes next
Microsoft has not said how many users were affected or when service will be fully restored. Al Jazeera reported that service may return gradually as applications reconnect. The outage follows a January Microsoft 365 failure in North America, and it comes as European governments debate reducing their reliance on US technology providers.
