Microsoft struggles to restore services as outage hits companies and governments worldwide

Detailed summary

From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.

HONG KONG — From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.

Microsoft said in an update Friday that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”

The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”

Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website.

Roughly 130,000 users from dozens of countries reported problems accessing Outlook on the outage tracker Downdetector on Thursday, although reports have since declined.

A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.

Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.

Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.

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