Outlook And Team — An outage affecting Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams. Additionally, Copilot has stretched into a second day, leaving businesses and governments around the world struggling to access email communications.
As of Friday midday ET, almost 24 hours since the outage was first reported, Microsoft said it was observing “signs of sustained recovery” across its services, with email queues “approaching normal levels.” Full recovery efforts continued.
The company reported “no evidence of malicious activity associated with the incident” at this time.
“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI/agents. The incident an introduced issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions,” Microsoft said in an update.
Outlook and Teams are widely-used workplace applications, with hundreds of millions of users. The disruption to the services left some affected workers unable to access their emails, host meetings, or complete other Microsoft-dependent office tasks.
Governments and companies impacted worldwide
The U.S. House of Representatives the impacted Microsoft outage, its communications department told TIME. The House’s technology teams worked with Microsoft to restore email access for its members “as quickly as possible.”
Municipal governments across the United States were still encountering significant system issues Friday morning, with digital communications interrupted.
Baltimore County Government said its staff were “unable to send or receive emails due to the widespread Microsoft outage,” but assured the public that 911 and other essential county services had not been affected. Offices belonging to the City of Jacksonville, Florida. Additionally, City of Austin, Texas, reported similar disruptions to email capabilities.
Tech businesses also faced disruptions to their day-to-day operations.
Users of two leading artificial intelligence companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, reported failures involving Microsoft 365 integration tools.
Overseas, the U.K. government said it was still “experiencing problems sending and receiving emails.”
The outage also impacted Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), raising concerns about access to appointments and hospital schedules. Some NHS practices reported not being able to send or receive emails. Patients were advised to make contact via phone rather than using email. As a result, some NHS boards warned of an increased demand across phone lines.
In Japan, lawmaker Masanao Ozaki said the outage had affected the government’s IT infrastructure and that officials were “closely watching the company’s response.” Elsewhere, the Philippines’ Supreme Court warned that “responses to emails and other transactions may be delayed.”
In India, the outage disrupted operations at several airlines, with IndiGo and Akasa Air reporting problems related to its customer-support email services.
In Australia, federal bodies including intelligence agency ASIO and the Australian Federal Police were affected. Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke reiterated that Microsoft did not believe it was dealing with a cyberattack, suggesting the disruption could instead be related to a faulty software update.
“They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said during a press conference.
A major Microsoft IT outage in 2024 grounded flights, sent TV stations off air. Additionally, disrupted online hospital systems. The malfunction was linked to a third party, a cybersecurity technology firm named CrowdStrike.
How Microsoft is responding
Microsoft acknowledged initial reports of an outage Thursday afternoon, just before 1 p.m. ET, with outage-tracking website Downdetector.com recording nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems.
In the hours that followed, Microsoft continued to issue updates as its engineers worked to restore affected services. The company said it would restart and repair impacted infrastructure, before gradually bringing the services back online.
Engineers were also exploring additional measures, such as actively restarting and validating affected servers and using automated recovery systems to find and restart unresponsive servers, in an effort to speed up the process.
TIME has reached out to Microsoft for further information.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has experienced an outage. In addition to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, the company also experienced disruptions affecting Microsoft 365 in January this year and flagged connectivity issues across multiple regions with its Azure cloud platform in October last year.
A return to faxes and phones
The Microsoft outage has prompted some offices to resort to older forms of technology.
Traders in Japan have reported a return to analog measures, sending faxes to get deals over the line rather than using email confirmations.
Ryutaro Kimura, a Tokyo-based senior bond strategist at BNP Paribas Asset Management, told Bloomberg that trading itself is largely unaffected as “desks were still getting trades done by phone and fax.”
Companies across the country’s leading industries have also urged customers to avoid email in the interim. Tokyo International Air Cargo Terminal, for example, told customers to reach out via phone or fax.
More coverage of Outlook And Team is expected as the story develops.
About The Author
