Major Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot worldwide

Widespread disruption of corporate services

Users of Microsoft services in various parts of the world encountered a major outage that knocked out key tools, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The first reports of the malfunction came from residents of North and South America. Company representatives confirmed that the issue affected the Exchange Online cloud email service and Microsoft 365 features that rely on it.

Record number of complaints in the US

According to Reuters, at the peak of the outage, the Downdetector service received over 130,000 messages from American users within one hour regarding issues with Outlook.

Impact on government bodies in Australia and Japan

The outage subsequently spread to Australia and countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In Australia, email access problems were reported by the Federal Police and the counter-intelligence service. Australian Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke stated that Microsoft management, with whom he discussed the situation, said they saw no signs of a hack in the outage.

In Japan, the Cabinet Office reported that the outage negatively impacted the infrastructure of the government’s information system.

Among those affected are tech giants and airlines

The list of organisations that encountered problems also includes AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic, Indian airlines, and numerous other companies. At the time of publication, Microsoft had not yet fully resolved the issues.