Get Guardian on GoogleMicrosoft has said that efforts to repair a major outage of Outlook were not going as expected and the firm was seeking alternative solutions as users around the world were left without its crucial services.
The hours-long disruption, which Microsoft attributed to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, has hit email as well as products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.
The impact of the outage has been felt globally, with users ranging from companies to governments reporting that they were unable to communicate via Outlook.
Microsoft said on X, “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected.”
The tech giant added, “We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity,” without saying when service was expected to be fully restored.
The disruption went global within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported.
A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.
One of the impacted countries was New Zealand, where the foreign ministry sent a notice saying its ability to receive emails had been affected by the global Microsoft outage. The ministry said the problem also affected all New Zealand Embassies, Consulates and Representative Offices around the world.
Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports in the Americas, but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.
Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.
The company wrote on X, “We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.”
It added, “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”
Downdetector, which tracks online outages, showed a sharp decline around 0450 GMT in users’ reports of disruptions in Washington and Hong Kong. Thousands of users also reported issues with Teams and Copilot, according to the platform.
As the outage dragged on for hours, Microsoft posted a series of updates on X, detailing continued but unsuccessful efforts to restore full service.
In one update shortly after, Microsoft said it was observing limited recovery as it sought to route user traffic away from affected servers. The company added that as capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect.
By Friday, the effects had reached Britain’s state health service, with a union leader warning in a statement that the issue was having a “serious impact” on the National Health Service.
The public services head at the GMB union, Rachel Harrison, said, “NHS staff receiving emergency calls are unable to refer patient details in the normal way, which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos.”
She added, however, that “emergency and life-threatening call-outs appear to be unaffected.”
Microsoft ruled out “malicious” activity for an outage that has left probably millions without access or with limited access to its services, including Outlook and Teams.
NHS bodies published messages on social media reporting difficulties with Microsoft services.
The National Pharmacy Association, which represents independent pharmacies, told AFP that the problem was affecting its members’ ability to communicate with doctors’ offices, causing delays in dealing with patients’ prescriptions.
