Microsoft Outage Felt Worldwide as 74 Countries Lose Outlook
A Microsoft 365 failure that began Thursday cut off Outlook, Teams and Copilot in at least 74 countries. Governments, courts, airlines and hospitals reported disruption, while Microsoft said a software patch was showing early results and denied malicious activity.
A Microsoft 365 failure that began around midday US Eastern Time (17:00 GMT) on Thursday has knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot in at least 74 countries, and the Microsoft outage felt worldwide had not fully cleared by Friday.
Microsoft said users faced "connectivity problems". It blamed "elevated load" on part of its infrastructure across multiple regions.
What Microsoft says it is doing
The company said it applied a software patch and was "seeing positive results for server stability". It was working to expand the fix to servers supporting regions coming back online, it said in an update at 0730 GMT.
Progress has been uneven. Around 0300 GMT, Microsoft said on X that it had confirmed the changes were "not taking as expected". It gave no time for full recovery.
The company also said it was "not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident". Outage tracker Downdetector showed disruption reports declining by 0900 GMT.
Government and public services hit
In the US, House of Representatives staff said their work had stalled. "There goes a day of legislative work," one staff member said. Courts from Los Angeles to Texas warned that communications might be delayed.
The City of Austin, Texas, said employees could not send or receive email. It added that "City phone lines remain operational, and 911 Emergency services are not impacted."
Japan's government said its shared IT platform was disrupted. Economy, trade and industry minister Ryosei Akazawa said there was no doubt of a "significant impact". Singapore said some government systems were affected but emergency services remained fully operational.
Immigration New Zealand paused processing of all visa applications until further notice. The Philippine Supreme Court warned that email responses and other transactions might be delayed.
Hospitals, airlines and businesses
Unity Health Toronto, which runs several hospitals in the city, declared a code grey, a signal of infrastructure failure. The network said staff had trouble sending or receiving email but patient care was not affected.
Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said on X that their email support services were affected and customer emails might not arrive. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group moved its third-quarter results from November 12 to November 16, citing disruption from the outage.
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft's services. Anthropic also reported problems.
In India, a senior executive at a large brokerage said Outlook failure was manageable because the firm had an alternative. Teams calls with big clients were harder to replace, the executive said, speaking anonymously.
Some Japanese companies turned to fax machines, according to reports. Firms in China, where many use locally made software such as WPS Office, also reported frustration because Outlook is a main channel for contacting colleagues abroad.
Australian Computer Society chief executive Prins Ralston called for a national review of sovereign IT risk. "We need to know the systems that keep this country running won't simply fall over without notice," he said.
