Microsoft: global outage hits Outlook, Teams in 74 countries
Microsoft's Outlook, Teams and Copilot services suffered a global outage lasting nearly a full day, hitting government agencies in several countries, as the company rules out a cyberattack.
Major Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, were hit by a global technical outage that began Thursday evening at around 16:00 GMT and lasted nearly a full day, according to Hespress, citing the German press agency (dpa). The outage-tracking platform Downdetector logged reports of service disruption in 74 countries and territories within about an hour of the outage's start.
According to Al Jazeera, Outlook was hit hardest: users could not open their mailboxes via the web, the app or mobile, and many emails arrived late. Copilot was also disrupted, and some Teams features were affected, although calls and chats largely kept working. Third-party services tied to Microsoft's infrastructure and used by OpenAI and Anthropic were affected too, according to France24.
What exactly was disrupted?
The outage hit public institutions and essential services across several continents: government systems were disrupted in Singapore and Japan, communications at the Philippines' Supreme Court were affected, and Australia's intelligence agency and federal police were among the organisations hit, according to Al Jazeera. In New Zealand, the immigration department temporarily suspended processing of all visa applications, while government bodies and companies switched to manual work, according to Hespress. In Canada, Unity Health Toronto declared its internal emergency protocol known as Code Grey after its internal email system failed, while stressing that patient safety was unaffected: "Our hospitals remain safe and open to provide care."
What is Microsoft saying?
The company posted an update on X saying: "We're seeing encouraging progress in recovery, with improving service availability," adding that it would keep posting updates on X and on its service status page, according to Hespress. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said there was no indication the outage resulted from malicious or cyber activity, according to Al Jazeera. Australia's Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, said he had been briefed by Microsoft, which told him it "does not believe, at this stage, that it is dealing with a cyber incident," comparing the episode to the CrowdStrike outage caused by a faulty software update. Microsoft said a number of its servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, and said on Friday it was rolling back a network change, without confirming whether that change caused the outage, according to Al Jazeera.
Is this the first crisis of its kind?
This is not the first time Microsoft's services have suffered such a widespread outage: in January 2026, Microsoft 365 went down across North America for almost 10 hours, and in late August 2026 thousands of Outlook users worldwide were locked out, according to Al Jazeera. An AWS outage also disrupted many websites and apps in October 2025, while a faulty CrowdStrike software update crashed computers worldwide in July 2024. Walter Pasquarelli, an affiliate researcher at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and an AI specialist, estimates about 430 million people use Microsoft's services worldwide, while technology analyst and journalist Rupert Goodwins says the company's fixes "aren't really working yet," though he does not expect an immediate financial hit given customers' long-term licensing contracts, while not ruling out a more limited long-term effect.