TLDR;
Microsoft services suffered a widespread outage affecting users in 74 countries and territories, disrupting email, meetings and other work. Microsoft said it was not aware of malicious activity and attributed the incident to unusually high infrastructure load after some servers became unavailable. Recovery was slower than expected, with only limited improvement reported.
- Outlook, Teams and Microsoft Copilot were among the affected services.
- The disruption affected businesses, schools and some government services worldwide.
- Failed server health checks shifted traffic to other servers, which then struggled to cope with the extra load.
Global outage disrupts Microsoft services [0:00]
Microsoft said it was not aware of any malicious activity behind an outage affecting its services across 74 countries and territories. Outlook, Teams and its AI software Copilot were among the products experiencing connectivity problems. The company described the cause as an elevated load on its infrastructure, which left some servers unexpectedly unavailable. Its attempts to resolve the issue were taking longer than expected, despite earlier signs of progress.
Disruption affects work, schools and public services [0:42]
The outage disrupted email and online meetings, affecting workflows in many parts of the world. It began as the working day started in Asia, and also affected people in the United States and elsewhere who were unable to connect with colleagues and clients. Schools in Asia, particularly in Australia, reported that they could not hold online classes. Some public services in China, Japan and Australia were also affected, as Microsoft products support many official communication and email systems.
Server failures cause overload as recovery remains limited [1:44]
The precise cause was not yet known, but some background servers failed their automatic health checks and shut down. The traffic they had been handling was redirected to other servers, which could not manage the sudden increase in demand and also became unavailable. Microsoft was working to fix the problem, but its latest update indicated only limited recovery. The disruption was expected to continue for some time.
