Microsoft Outlook global outage repair efforts not going 'as expected'
The disruption went global within a span of an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported.
A widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms including Outlook on Thursday, with many users encountering trouble using their email accounts and other errors across the tech giant's suite of apps.
Early on Friday, Microsoft said steps it had taken to fix the outage were not going "as expected", and the company was working to find alternative solutions.
"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected. We're identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," Microsoft said in a post on X.
The disruption, which Microsoft attributed to "elevated load" on its infrastructure, dragged on for much of the US workday and also affected other company products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.
The disruption went global within a span of an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported.
A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas, and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.
In the United States, around 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT), according to Downdetector.
Outage reports have since declined, with about 37,000 users reporting experiencing issues with Outlook as of 6 pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT).
Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas," but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected "Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region."
Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.
"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company wrote on X.
"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it added.
"We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service."
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Microsoft says it is making gradual progress in resolving the widespread outage of its services.
"We're seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of our latest traffic optimization actions," the company wrote on X, adding that the measures would be rolled out across affected regions.
The hours-long major outage has cut off countless companies and consumers around the world from central cloud services.
Microsoft 365 products including Outlook, Copilot and Teams were among those affected by the outage, which began at around 1600 GMT on Thursday.
On the Teams office communication platform, scheduling meetings and calendar connections were not working properly.
Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, was affected too, while interfaces to third parties such as OpenAI and Anthropic were temporarily disrupted.
Microsoft has been documenting its step-by-step efforts to overcome the outage in posts on X and on its service status page.
A Microsoft outage caused disruption across the globe on Thursday, knocking several of the company's services offline.
Microsoft said its latest efforts to restore services were not working as expected.
"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected."
The company was "reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing," it said.
"We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious activity."
Earlier, Microsoft said it was "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact" and had restarted servers in hopes to return them to service.
However, the servers brought back online "can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic," it said.
"We're analyzing diagnostic data to determine what's triggering the behaviour."
Microsoft 365 products including Outlook, Copilot and Teams were among those affected by the outage, which began around 1600 GMT.
Downdetector said the outage had been reported in 74 countries and territories within about an hour.
"Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level," it said on X.
The outage also disrupted some services at OpenAI and Anthropic.
"We're investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected," OpenAI said in a service update.
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he had been briefed about the outage.
"The perspective of Microsoft at this stage, they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event," he said.
"They believe that they're dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry."
In Germany, rail operator Deutsche Bahn said the outage had caused major email delays, making it difficult to send out timetables for diverted trains.
In New Zealand, government organizations and businesses were impacted and had reverted to manual methods of working. Immigration New Zealand said it had paused the processing of all visa applications.
In Canada, Unity Health Toronto declared a "code grey" due to the outage. The code is called when there is a loss or failure of infrastructure. It said its email system was down, but patient and resident care was not affected. "Our hospitals remain safe and open to provide care."
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