Microsoft says it has made only marginal success in restoring its workplace services. A global outage knocked out Outlook and disrupted Teams and Copilot for users in 74 countries more than 12 hours ago.
In an early Friday update on its service health page, the company said it was monitoring activity across regions to check server status and add capacity. It said it was reviewing server performance. It was also confirming that patches worked as intended once infrastructure reboots finished.
How the outage unfolded
Problems began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users could not open Outlook. Within about an hour, the tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories.
Microsoft first spoke of problems in the Americas. It later confirmed that users in any region could be affected. It said the affected infrastructure was under elevated load across multiple regions, which likely added to the connectivity errors. It later said several servers had become unexpectedly unavailable. The extra load, it said, did not come from a rise in traffic.
The disruption ran through the US working day and into the night. By Friday morning in Europe, it was unresolved. Servers that Microsoft had restored were failing again.
Rupert Goodwins, a technology analyst and journalist, told Al Jazeera the scale was impressive but not unprecedented. He called it very embarrassing for Microsoft and very annoying for everyone else.
How many people are affected
Microsoft has not said how many users are hit. Downdetector gives a partial picture. At about 07:00 GMT on Friday, it had at least 43,000 Outlook reports from 72 countries. The real number is likely far higher, because the tracker counts only people who report a problem.
Walter Pasquarelli, an affiliate researcher at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and an AI specialist, noted that about 430 million people use Microsoft services; reports Al Jazeera. He called it first and foremost a communication risk.
Government systems in Singapore and Japan were disrupted. So were communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines. In Australia, the national spy agency and the federal police were among those hit.
Which services are down
Outlook took the worst of it. Users could not open mailboxes on the web, in the app or on mobile. Many emails that did send arrived late. Other services were partly disrupted. The problems spread to integrations that other companies rely on, including the AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic. Pasquarelli said people take these tools for granted until they fail, much like health.
The cause: not a cyberattack, says Microsoft
Microsoft has not published a root cause. It says a cyberattack did not cause the outage. On Friday, it was rolling back a network change, but it did not say whether that change was to blame.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said on X late on Thursday that nothing indicates malicious or cyber activity. Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft told him it did not believe it faced a cyberattack. He said the company believes it is dealing with something like the CrowdStrike incident, an update that has gone wrong.
Goodwins said elevated load usually has one of two causes. One is an attacker flooding a system with artificial traffic. He said he believes Microsoft that this has not happened, as such attacks can be mitigated. The other is a faulty update to internal systems. A mistake in the update makes servers reset or lose contact with each other.
Pasquarelli said the evidence so far points to a technical failure. He listed possible causes: damaged infrastructure such as a cable, incompetence or an error in automated systems. He saw no evidence of extreme computing load or traffic from AI systems.
Goodwins said Microsoft’s focus on AI may have played an indirect part. He said email and Teams are probably seen as forgotten revenue sources that did not get enough investment or management attention. He added that, for all Microsoft’s AI, it has no AI that can help fix its networks.
Why the fixes are not holding
Microsoft posted a string of updates on X. Late on Thursday it reported only limited recovery as it tried to steer users’ traffic away from affected servers. It later said its changes were not taking effect as expected.
Pasquarelli explained that some servers began failing automated health checks. Traffic then moved to other servers, which became overloaded. He compared it to a four-lane highway that suddenly has two lanes. The extra traffic shuts down the whole road.
Goodwins said servers that go offline try to reconnect to synchronise their files. When they come back, traffic from all the other servers swamps them, and everything falls over again. He compared it to clearing a traffic accident, then finding gridlock and a huge backlog.
He also said many experienced engineers have left Microsoft. He said the problem is less a shortage of people than a loss of the staff who built the systems, and with them the company’s memory of how they work.
When will services return
Microsoft has given no timeline for full recovery. It said service may return gradually as apps reconnect, rather than all at once.
What it could mean for Microsoft
The outage comes as Europe pushes for more technological sovereignty. It wants to run its own servers and depend less on foreign providers. Europe has no tech giants of its own and leans heavily on US firms.
The push has gained pace during US President Donald Trump’s second term. He has imposed tariffs on Europe and threatened to take over Greenland, a Danish territory. Earlier this year, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said government officials would stop using Zoom and other US-owned video tools. They would move to French software, partly to cut dependence on non-European actors.
Goodwins said worries over data security under US law have driven European efforts to find alternatives to Microsoft. He said outages like this add pressure. He said Microsoft has relied on intensive inertia, with customers staying because switching is painful. At some point, he said, that pain threshold changes.
He does not expect an immediate hit to revenue, because customers are locked into licensing contracts. In the long term, he thinks it probably will hurt.
Pasquarelli said he could see a short dip in Microsoft’s shares. He said its dominance in office software would be hard to copy, and no European firm could offer a credible alternative. He expects organisations to focus on digital resilience rather than build their own systems.
