Microsoft says sorry for 24 hours-long global outage

Detailed summary

A global outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams is easing after about 24 hours of chaos that crippled online communications, forcing some ‌organisations to revert to fax.

A global outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams is easing after about 24 hours of chaos that crippled online communications, forcing some ‌organisations to revert to fax.

Microsoft said server issues were behind the incident that also affected its Copilot AI assistant and that a broader roll-out of software fixes was starting to stabilise the system.

It said it was not aware ‌of any malicious activity and ruled out artificial intelligence as the cause.

Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications with hundreds of millions of users.

The outage prevented people from performing essential functions such as sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.

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Organisations that host Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than in the cloud, were somewhat spared.

The outage, reports of which started climbing about 4.25am AEDT on Friday according to Ookla, is one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second disruption to its services this year.

"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," the company said in its latest update.

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