Microsoft Outage: Outlook and Teams Disruption Affects Users Worldwide

WASHINGTON: Microsoft’s Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services experienced a major disruption, affecting businesses, government agencies and users worldwide as the technology company worked to restore its systems.

The outage lasted more than 12 hours, interrupting email communications, business operations and other services dependent on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure.

The disruption initially affected thousands of users in the United States. Downdetector, an outage-tracking platform, recorded more than 97,000 reports of Outlook problems at 2:07pm Eastern Time on Thursday.

Reports later peaked at 138,058 around 1pm ET before falling to approximately 34,490 by 6pm, indicating some improvement as Microsoft worked to restore affected services.

Microsoft 365 and Teams also experienced disruptions, while connectors used by artificial intelligence services from OpenAI and Anthropic were reportedly affected.

Microsoft attributed the outage to the unexpected unavailability of several servers. This shifted additional traffic onto the remaining infrastructure, increasing pressure on the company’s systems.

The company said the incident was not caused by an overall increase in traffic. It paused deployments and configuration changes, redistributed traffic across its global infrastructure and restarted affected servers to improve service availability.

Microsoft also said it had found no evidence of malicious activity behind the disruption.

The outage extended beyond individual users, affecting government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as airlines, financial institutions and other businesses.

Some companies faced delays in publishing financial results, while trading-related communications were disrupted. Financial firms in Taiwan also experienced operational difficulties, with some transactions requiring alternative confirmation arrangements.

The incident has renewed concerns about organisations’ growing dependence on a small number of major cloud and productivity service providers.

Repeated disruptions could prompt businesses to reassess their reliance on single technology platforms and strengthen backup communication systems.

For organisations that depend on uninterrupted digital communication, the outage highlighted how a technical failure at one provider can quickly affect operations across multiple industries.