Millions Affected as Microsoft Battles Global Outage Disrupting Outlook and Teams

Microsoft is battling to restore its Outlook email service following a major global outage that disrupted several of its products, including Microsoft Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot, leaving millions of users and organisations struggling to access essential services.

The technology giant disclosed on Thursday that efforts to resolve the disruption were not progressing as expected, prompting the company to explore alternative measures to restore normal operations.

The outage, which Microsoft attributed to unusually high traffic and increased pressure on its infrastructure, affected users across several countries, with businesses, government agencies and individuals reporting difficulties accessing their accounts and communicating through the affected platforms.

In an update posted on its official X account, Microsoft said it had discovered that the corrective measures initially introduced were not producing the expected results.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company stated.

It added that engineers were exploring alternative solutions to increase system capacity and minimise the impact on users.

The disruption reportedly spread across the world within an hour, affecting Microsoft services in 74 countries and territories, according to outage-tracking platform Downdetector.

A map shared by Downdetector indicated that users in parts of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa were affected.

New Zealand was among the countries that experienced the disruption. Its Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade issued a notice informing the public that its ability to receive emails had been affected by the global Microsoft outage.

The ministry also disclosed that the disruption affected New Zealand’s embassies, consulates and representative offices across the world.

Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of service interruptions in the Americas but later acknowledged that the problem appeared to affect Microsoft 365 connectivity across multiple regions.

The company explained that some of its infrastructure was experiencing unusually high traffic, which was likely responsible for the connectivity problems.

“We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” Microsoft said.

It assured users that efforts were ongoing to reduce the impact and restore affected services.

Microsoft 365, the company’s cloud-based subscription platform, provides access to widely used applications, including Outlook, Teams and other productivity tools used by businesses, institutions and government organisations.

Downdetector recorded thousands of complaints from users experiencing difficulties with Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

Although the platform later indicated a decline in outage reports in locations such as Washington and Hong Kong, Microsoft continued to work towards restoring services fully.

In another update posted shortly after 6 p.m. Eastern Time, the company reported limited signs of recovery as engineers worked to redirect user traffic away from affected servers.

Microsoft explained that users might experience a gradual restoration of services as additional capacity became available and their applications reconnected to the system.

However, the company did not immediately provide a definite timeline for the complete restoration of all affected services.

The global disruption highlighted the widespread dependence of businesses, governments and individuals on Microsoft’s cloud-based communication and productivity platforms.

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