Global Microsoft Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams, and Copilot Across 74 Countries

Microsoft has reported only "marginal success" in restoring its core workplace services after a massive global outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, and Copilot for users in 74 countries. In a statement on its service health page, the company noted it is monitoring regional activity to assess server status and improve capacity, which includes reviewing server performance and confirming the application of developed patches following infrastructure reboots.

The issues began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday, starting with Outlook. Within an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector logged reports from 74 countries and territories. While Microsoft initially focused on the Americas, it later confirmed the outage could affect any region, citing elevated load across multiple regions as a primary cause for connectivity errors. The company clarified that this elevated load was not caused by an increase in traffic, but rather by servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable.

The disruption persisted through the US working day and into Friday morning in Europe, where restored servers continued to fail. Technology analyst Rupert Goodwins told Al Jazeera that while such events are not unprecedented, the scale is impressive and embarrassing for Microsoft.

While Microsoft has not confirmed the exact number of users affected, Downdetector received at least 43,000 reports regarding Outlook by 07:00 GMT on Friday. Walter Pasquarelli, an AI specialist and affiliate researcher at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, noted that with approximately 430 million people using Microsoft services, this represents a significant communication risk.

The outage impacted government systems in Singapore and Japan, as well as communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines. In Australia, the federal police and the country's spy agency were among the affected organizations. Outlook was hit hardest, with users unable to access mailboxes via web, app, or mobile devices. The disruption also extended to integrations used by AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic.

Microsoft has denied that the outage was the result of a cyberattack. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, stated on X that there was no indication of malicious activity. Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke suggested the issue was similar to the CrowdStrike event, where a faulty update went awry. Rupert Goodwins added that the most likely cause is a faulty internal system update, while Walter Pasquarelli suggested it could be a technical failure or a mistake in automated systems.

Goodwins also suggested that Microsoft's intense focus on AI may have led to the neglect of legacy services like email and Teams, noting that the company lacks AI capable of fixing its own networks. The difficulty in restoration is attributed to a "gridlock" effect, where restored servers are immediately swamped by backlogged traffic. Goodwins also pointed to a draining of corporate memory as experienced engineers have left the company.

Microsoft has not provided a timeline for full recovery, stating that service will return gradually. Users are advised that there is little they can do personally as the problem is server-side. This follows other major outages this year, including a Microsoft 365 outage in North America in January and an Outlook lockout in late August. Other tech giants have also faced failures, such as Amazon Web Services in October 2025 and CrowdStrike in July 2024.

The event has intensified calls for technological sovereignty in Europe, where leaders like French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu have pushed for alternatives to US-owned tools like Zoom to reduce dependencies. Rupert Goodwins noted that while Microsoft's revenue may not be immediately impacted due to licensing contracts, the long-term pressure to find alternatives will increase. Walter Pasquarelli added that while shares might dip, Microsoft's dominance in office software remains difficult to replicate, leading organizations to focus on digital resilience.