Hours-long Microsoft outage hits companies, governments

Detailed summary

A global Microsoft outage that has lasted more than 12 hours has prevented people from sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.

A more than 12-hour outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams has crippled communications for businesses and governments globally, forcing some organisations to revert to fax machines and halting at least one bond repurchase ‌in Europe.

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.

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.

It affected government agencies from Australia to Japan and the United States, caused delays at trading firms, hindered some companies from publishing earnings and prompted airlines to warn customers of communication lags, according to public statements.

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

"We're seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure," the company said in its latest update as some users started reporting that their emails were restored.

The outage is one of the longest in Microsoft's history ‌and the second disruption to ‌its services this year.

Microsoft said ⁠the outage specifically hit features tied to Exchange Online - its cloud-based email and scheduling hub - leaving unconnected applications operational.

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