A major global Microsoft outage has caused problems, or in some cases disabled entire services, including emails and artificial intelligence products. Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyber-security incident, but efforts to fix the issues have so far been largely unsuccessful.
Source: What we know about the global Microsoft outage. Supporting passage: A major global Microsoft outage has caused problems, or in some cases disabled entire services, including emails and artificial intelligence products.
Source: What we know about the global Microsoft outage. Supporting passage: Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyber-security incident, but efforts to fix the issues have so far been largely unsuccessful.
Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft's artificial intelligence software Copilot, have been affected by connectivity problems. Customers report varying levels of access, with many unable to send or receive emails, view certain files or details on their calendar apps.
Source: What we know about the global Microsoft outage. Supporting passage: Microsoft 365 Services, including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft's artificial intelligence software Copilot, have been affected by "connectivity problems".
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps according to Microsoft's website, but the full scale of the outage has not been confirmed. Monitoring website Downdetector had 140,000 people from 74 countries report issues with Outlook on Thursday evening, and the real figure affected is likely much higher.
Source: What we know about the global Microsoft outage. Supporting passage: monitoring website Downdetector had 140,000 people from 74 countries report issues with Outlook on Thursday evening.
Microsoft has ruled out a cyber-attack and attributed the ongoing outage to elevated load on its infrastructure. A large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, sending added traffic to remaining servers and straining these; on Friday morning the company said it was seeing early signs of stabilisation but service capacity had not yet returned to normal levels.
Source: What we know about the global Microsoft outage. Supporting passage: Microsoft has ruled out a cyber-attack and attributed the ongoing outage to "elevated load" on its infrastructure.
Source: What we know about the global Microsoft outage. Supporting passage: On Friday morning, Microsoft said it was seeing "early signs of stabilisation", but service capacity has "not yet returned to normal levels".
Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic have both reported problems as a result of the outage. Government agencies and services, including the Singaporean government and Australia's spy agency, and UK GP surgeries, pharmacies, police and schools have been affected.
Source: What we know about the global Microsoft outage. Supporting passage: Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic have both reported problems as a result of the outage.
Experts said the outage could have far-reaching consequences. Australian cyber-security expert Troy Hunt said Microsoft is a massive part of the internet backbone and the outage affects the ability to communicate about appointments, purchase things that need verification, create or access accounts and services.
Source: What we know about the global Microsoft outage. Supporting passage: Microsoft is a massive part of the internet backbone and reminds us how critical email still is.
Uncertainty: The full scale of the outage has not been confirmed.
Uncertainty: Downdetector's figures rely primarily on users self-reporting, so the real figure affected is likely much higher.
Uncertainty: Microsoft said earlier that attempted fixes were not taking as expected, and service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels.
Uncertainty: The total number of affected users and the time to full recovery remain unclear.