Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams for thousands globally; businesses impacted

Detailed summary

Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps of the company remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday, with the outage also hitting connectors…

Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams were disrupted for about 10 hours on Thursday as the tech giant struggled to fix issues with some servers, hitting businesses and government agencies globally that use the popular platforms.

In its latest update, Microsoft said efforts to improve serviceability were not progressing as expected. "We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," it said.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed more than 25,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at 9:30 p.m. ET (0230 GMT). It also showed outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, early Friday local time.

At its peak, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US around 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.

In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 services that depended on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional. Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.

Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack.

"They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke said at a press conference.

"The impact that they are dealing with... is very much on email systems," the minister added.

Australia's spy agency and federal police were among organisations caught up in the outage on Friday.

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