Microsoft Struggles to Repair Worldwide Outage. Here's What You Need to Know

Detailed summary

The outage impacting various Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot AI assistant, has caused disruption to governments and businesses globally.

An outage affecting Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot has stretched into a second day, leaving businesses and governments around the world struggling to access email communications.

Microsoft said that as of Friday morning, users may still “be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.” While it noted an “encouraging recovery progress in Europe,” with some access in North America “also improving,” it acknowledged that users may still experience “intermittent issues” as recovery actions continue and major gaps persist.

“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” the company stated.

Outlook and Teams are widely-used workplace applications, with hundreds of millions of users. The disruption to the services has left some affected workers unable to access their emails, host meetings, or complete other Microsoft-dependent office tasks.

Municipal governments across the United States are still encountering significant system issues, with digital communications interrupted.

Baltimore County Government said its staff are "currently unable to send or receive emails due to the widespread Microsoft outage,” but assured the public that 911 and other essential county services had not been affected. The City of Jacksonville, Florida, and City of Austin, Texas, reported similar disruptions to its email capabilities.

Tech businesses have also faced disruptions to their day-to-day operations.

Users of two leading artificial intelligence companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, reported failures involving Microsoft 365 integration tools.

Overseas, the U.K. government said it is still “experiencing problems sending and receiving emails.”

Opening of the article, excerpted from Time. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.