A widespread outage affecting Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot AI assistant, has stretched into a second day, causing significant disruptions for businesses and governments globally. Microsoft reported on Friday morning that users might still be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services, though recovery progress was noted in Europe and some improvement in North America.
Microsoft stated that there is currently no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident. The disruption has left millions of users unable to access emails, host meetings, or perform other essential tasks dependent on Microsoft applications.
Governments worldwide have reported system issues. Baltimore County, Maryland, confirmed staff could not send or receive emails, though essential services like 911 were unaffected. The cities of Jacksonville, Florida, and Austin, Texas, also experienced interruptions to their email capabilities. Overseas, the U.K. government reported ongoing problems with sending and receiving emails, and Britain's National Health Service (NHS) faced concerns about appointment and schedule access, with some practices unable to send or receive emails and advising patients to use phone contact.
In Asia, Japan's IT infrastructure was affected, and the Philippines' Supreme Court warned of potential delays in responses and transactions. India saw disruptions at airlines like IndiGo and Akasa Air affecting customer support email services. In Australia, federal bodies, including intelligence agencies, were impacted. Australian Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Tony Burke, suggested the disruption might be related to a faulty software update, drawing parallels to a previous incident involving cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.
Users of OpenAI and Anthropic, two leading AI companies, also reported failures with Microsoft 365 integration tools. The outage began on Thursday, with outage-tracking website Downdetector.com recording a peak of nearly 130,000 reports for Outlook problems and over 45,000 for Microsoft 365 in the U.S. around 1 p.m. ET.
Microsoft engineers are working to restore affected services by restarting and repairing impacted infrastructure. Automated recovery systems are being employed to speed up the process. This incident follows previous disruptions, including a significant outage in 2024 linked to CrowdStrike, a January 2024 issue with Microsoft 365, and connectivity problems with its Azure cloud platform in October of the previous year.