A Microsoft outage spanning Asia and the United States continued for hours, disrupting services such as Outlook and Teams for users, businesses and some government agencies.
Microsoft said early Friday that the disruption affected a broad range of Microsoft 365 services connected to Exchange Online and its email systems. Users reported outages involving Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant.
The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was testing multiple approaches to determine the cause and restore its servers, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”
Microsoft said it had found no evidence of malicious activity and would handle the incident “with urgency until full mitigation.”
“We’ve made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region,” the company said Friday. “Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues.”
“Our focus is now on extending these recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions, while continuing stabilization efforts and adding supporting capacity to improve service consistency,” it said.
Widespread impact
More than 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook on outage-tracking website Downdetector on Thursday, though the number of new reports has since dropped from its peak.
Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its Microsoft 365 applications.
OpenAI and Anthropic also said they were experiencing difficulties connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, highlighting the broader consequences of service disruptions as more artificial intelligence platforms connect with third-party software.
Workhorse Group Inc., a U.S.-based industrial technology company, postponed a conference call about its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had compared the disruption with the CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
Burke said he had spoken with Microsoft’s senior executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the worldwide disruption.
“They (Microsoft) don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told reporters in Sydney.
Texas-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike attributed the July 2024 global technology outage to a bug in an update that allowed its systems to send faulty data to millions of customer computers. The incident grounded flights, interrupted television broadcasts and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who operates an aluminum company, said the outage prevented his firm’s Outlook accounts from receiving updates from U.S. customers. If the disruption continued, it could “impact the production timeline,” he said.
Air India said its flight operations were not affected by the Microsoft outage. The airline temporarily redirected its email services, however, to ensure customer inquiries continued to reach it without interruption, according to a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline, said its email support services were also disrupted, limiting its ability to receive customer inquiries. In a statement on X, the airline said its other support channels remained available and that flight operations were unaffected.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government email services were down and that it was working with Microsoft to resolve the problem.
The Philippines’ Supreme Court said in a social media statement that the continuing Microsoft 365 outage had disrupted some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage had affected the government’s IT infrastructure and that officials were “keeping a close eye on the developments.”
