Technology and Scienceupdated 22m ago2 min read
Microsoft Global Outage Disrupts Outlook Mail and Teams Scheduling, Company Says
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14 Western Mainstream6 Other4 West Asian1 Latin AmericanThis article is an automated aggregation of coverage from news outlets. Our editorials offer in-depth analysis curated by the NewsCord team.
Global outage disrupts Outlook email and Teams meetings across 70+ countries. Outage began Thursday and persisted into Friday as restoration efforts continued.
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25 outlets in this story. Read their headlines below.
Outlook, Teams, Copilot hit
Microsoft said a global outage disrupted Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services, leaving users unable to access Outlook mailboxes and delaying email delivery. Microsoft also said the failure affected Teams calendar, invitations, and meeting scheduling, while joining calls and meetings and posting messages in channels generally continued to work.
Microsoft told users that it was working to restore service after it found that "a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests." Microsoft reported that it was seeing "early stabilization and capacity improvements" as recovery actions continued, while its status remained variable and capacity had not yet fully returned to its initial level.
What Microsoft said caused it
Microsoft said it was monitoring activity across regions to assess server status and find ways to improve capacity, including reviewing server performance and confirming patches after infrastructure reboots. Microsoft said it had ruled out a cyberattack and confirmed there was "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity," while it continued to share information as it assessed the infrastructure.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to elevated load and said a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, which sent added traffic to remaining servers and strained them. Al Jazeera quoted technology analyst and journalist Rupert Goodwins saying, "It’s very embarrassing for Microsoft and really, really annoying for the rest of us," as the outage continued into the US working day and into the night.
Scale, knock-on effects
Downdetector recorded at least 43,000 reports of problems with Outlook at about 07:00 GMT on Friday from users in 72 countries, and Microsoft had not confirmed the number of users affected. Microsoft said the outage affected services in 74 countries and territories, and Al Jazeera reported that government systems in Singapore and Japan were disrupted, as communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines were also affected.
“Microsoft is a massive part of the internet backbone and reminds us how critical email still is.”
Microsoft said the disruption spread beyond its own products, hitting integrations that other companies including OpenAI and Anthropic rely on, and OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft services. BBC quoted Australian cyber-security expert Troy Hunt warning that "Microsoft is a massive part of the internet backbone and reminds us how critical email still is," while he said the outage affected communication about appointments, purchase verification, and creating or accessing accounts and services.