The Microsoft Outlook outage spread across 74 countries and territories on Thursday, disrupting email and other Microsoft 365 services including Teams and Copilot for companies, governments and individual users. Microsoft said it was struggling to restore service after repair measures failed to work as expected.
The company attributed the disruption to elevated load across portions of its infrastructure in multiple regions. Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports from the Americas before confirming that Microsoft 365 connectivity problems could affect users in any region.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said in an update on X. The company said it was identifying alternative workstreams to increase capacity and reduce the impact, but did not provide a firm timeline for a full restoration.
The outage affected Outlook email as well as Microsoft Teams, the company’s workplace collaboration platform, and Copilot, its artificial intelligence assistant. Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based subscription service used by organisations to access communications and productivity applications.
The disruption had a direct effect on public institutions in some countries. New Zealand’s foreign ministry said its ability to receive emails had been affected by the global Microsoft outage, adding that the problem also affected its embassies, consulates and representative offices around the world.
Outage tracker Downdetector reported that the disruption became global within an hour. Its map showed reports from the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Thousands of users also reported problems with Teams and Copilot. Downdetector recorded a sharp decline in user reports around 0450 GMT in Washington and Hong Kong, although Microsoft continued to issue updates as the outage persisted.
In a later update shortly after 6 pm Eastern Time, or 2300 GMT, Microsoft said it was observing limited recovery while attempting to route user traffic away from affected servers. The company said users could experience a gradual recovery as capacity was restored and their clients reconnected. Microsoft continued to pursue measures to restore full service but had not announced that the outage was completely resolved.
