Microsoft Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot, Hitting Businesses and Governments Worldwide

San Francisco: A widespread Microsoft 365 outage that began on Thursday knocked out email and other workplace tools for businesses, schools and government offices in dozens of countries, and was still affecting users on Friday, according to reports.

The disruption started around 11.17 am Eastern time (1600 GMT) on Thursday, affecting Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online and Copilot. Downdetector received reports from 74 countries and territories within about an hour, and Outlook complaints peaked at around 130,000.

Microsoft said servers that were unexpectedly unavailable were straining its infrastructure. It restarted servers but warned that those brought back could stop responding again once traffic returned. The company said a recent configuration change coincided with the outage and engineers were rolling it back. Executive Vice-President Charles Lamanna said it was not caused by a cyberattack. On Friday, Microsoft said recovery was not proceeding as expected, with services still disrupted after more than eight hours.