Microsoft is battling to fix the widespread outage that has knocked out various platforms, including Outlook, for millions worldwide with the company acknowledging that efforts to restore services were ‘not taking as expected.’
Millions of users around the world began reporting that Outlook was down shortly after 6pm GMT on Thursday, in what experts have dubbed the ‘most disruptive email-related business outage of all time’.
More than 17 hours later, users are still unable to open their inboxes, send emails and access other Microsoft services.
Governments, police forces and numerous companies around the world have reported problems with their services, but no definitive cause has been given.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft’s suite of subscription service apps, though the company has not confirmed exactly how many users are affected by the outage.
Users have also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app, Teams, its artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot, as well as other Microsoft 365 services, in at least 74 countries.
Microsoft said on Thursday night that it was attempting to identify ‘alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances’ in order to address the outage.
Earlier, the company said that infrastructure experiencing an ‘elevated load across multiple regions’ was likely contributing to the connectivity errors.
Microsoft executive vice president, Charles Lamanna, said: ‘For now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.’
As Europe awoke to further disruption this morning, in the UK services including the NHS, police forces and rail companies are all affected.
Shortly after 12pm, Microsoft said it was seeing ‘encouraging’ progress in Europe as users began to be able to access services again, while availability in North America was ‘also improving’.
is battling to fix the widespread outage that has knocked out various platforms, including Outlook, for millions worldwide with the company acknowledging that efforts to restore services were ‘not taking as expected.’
Millions of users around the world began reporting that Outlook was down shortly after 6pm GMT on Thursday, in what experts have dubbed the ‘most disruptive email-related business outage of all time’.
More than 17 hours later, users are still unable to open their inboxes, send emails and access other Microsoft services.
Governments, police forces and numerous companies around the world have reported problems with their services, but no definitive cause has been given.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft’s suite of subscription service apps, though the company has not confirmed exactly how many users are affected by the outage.
Users have also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app, Teams, its artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot, as well as other Microsoft 365 services, in at least 74 countries.
Microsoft said on Thursday night that it was attempting to identify ‘alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances’ in order to address the outage.
Earlier, the company said that infrastructure experiencing an ‘elevated load across multiple regions’ was likely contributing to the connectivity errors.
Microsoft executive vice president, Charles Lamanna, said: ‘For now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.’
As Europe awoke to further disruption this morning, in the UK services including the NHS, police forces and rail companies are all affected.
Shortly after 12pm, Microsoft said it was seeing ‘encouraging’ progress in Europe as users began to be able to access services again, while availability in North America was ‘also improving’.
is battling to fix the widespread outage that has knocked out various platforms, including Outlook, for millions worldwide with the company acknowledging that efforts to restore services were ‘not taking as expected.’
Millions of users around the world began reporting that Outlook was down shortly after 6pm GMT on Thursday, in what experts have dubbed the ‘most disruptive email-related business outage of all time’.
More than 17 hours later, users are still unable to open their inboxes, send emails and access other Microsoft services.
Governments, police forces and numerous companies around the world have reported problems with their services, but no definitive cause has been given.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft’s suite of subscription service apps, though the company has not confirmed exactly how many users are affected by the outage.
Users have also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app, Teams, its artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot, as well as other Microsoft 365 services, in at least 74 countries.
Microsoft said on Thursday night that it was attempting to identify ‘alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances’ in order to address the outage.
Earlier, the company said that infrastructure experiencing an ‘elevated load across multiple regions’ was likely contributing to the connectivity errors.
Microsoft executive vice president, Charles Lamanna, said: ‘For now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.’
As Europe awoke to further disruption this morning, in the UK services including the NHS, police forces and rail companies are all affected.
Shortly after 12pm, Microsoft said it was seeing ‘encouraging’ progress in Europe as users began to be able to access services again, while availability in North America was ‘also improving’.
Reports Microsoft services are down worldwide
The outage has affected airlines, judicial systems and even national spy agencies around the world.
At around 9.30am, the firm said it was seeing ‘early stabilization and capacity improvements’ as a result of its recovery efforts, and said it had extended email timeout – the length of time until an email is classed as undeliverable – to 48 hours.
Later on Friday morning, Microsoft said it was seeing ‘incremental improvement in several workloads’, before adding it was making ‘additional progress towards service recovery’ and had ‘completed’ fixes in the Asia-Pacific region.
It comes after a similar, smaller scale outage in 2023 which Microsoft blamed on a ‘networking configuration issue’.
In an update on Friday morning, Microsoft said it has seen ‘marginal success’ as it attempts to fix the outage.
After applying a patch to Microsoft 365, it said it is seeing ‘positive results’ and promised to reveal the cause of the outage once the problems are fixed.
‘We’re seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure,’ Microsoft said.
The company added that it is continuing to work urgently to fix the issue affecting its services.
‘We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online.
‘As of now (7am GMT), we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution.
‘Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defence-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report.’
…
Experts have warned the outage is likely the ‘most disruptive’ ever seen.
Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter and a former leading software engineer at several major tech companies including Skype and Uber, told the BBC the level of disruption is ‘very unusual’.
‘That mitigation is taking 12 plus hours for a global outage for a service with 100 million plus users – this is very rare,’ he said.
‘This could well be the most disruptive email-related business outage of all time.’
Elsewhere, Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has said Microsoft had told him the company did not believe the outage had been caused by a cyber attack, according to Reuters.
China has also been affected by the Microsoft outage with many international firms in the country relying on Outlook or Teams as communication channels.
OpenAI said on Thursday afternoon that it was ‘investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.
‘We’ll share an update when we know more.’
The company noted that ChatGPT had suffered a ‘degraded performance.’
Another AI giant, Anthropic, reported that users were experiencing issues caused by a Microsoft 365 service incident, and that problems continue with its model Claude.
Anthropic said that mail, calendar and search tool functions in its Microsoft 365 connector were failing for most requests.
The outage even affected jails around the US, with the Arapahoe Sheriff’s Office in Colorado posting Thursday evening on X that officials were unable to receive email notifications needed to process online bond payments.
As a result, anyone needing to post bond for immediate release was asked to do so in person at the jail.
The US House of Representatives said the outage impacted its users and its engineers were working with Microsoft.
The New York City Department of Investigation noted that evictions scheduled for Friday were suspended as a result of the outage.
Elsewhere, India’s biggest airline IndiGo said it is not receiving emails and has urged travellers to use other available support channels.
The Philippines Supreme Court is currently experiencing similar issues and said: ‘responses to emails and other transactions may be delayed’.
In Australia, the nation’s spy and police agencies have also been hit by the Microsoft issues but officials said the impact is not severe.
‘The impact that they are dealing with is very much on email system’, head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, told reporters.
At its peak, reported problems with Outlook reached 140,000 complaints by 6pm yesterday, more than 2,000 times the average, according to monitoring website Downdetector.
By 7am on Friday, the email platform received 43,000 issue reports across 72 countries in a single hour.
Microsoft said a number of servers had become ‘unexpectedly unavailable’ because of a problem that caused them to fail during ‘automated health checks.’
It is not immediately clear why the failure happened.
The company later said it was testing a fix and rolling out an alternative method to bring the impacted servers back online.
‘We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,’ Microsoft’s 365 Status account wrote on X.
Overnight Microsoft posted that ‘mitigative actions’ had ‘successfully restored service health and functionality’ in North America.
Microsoft touted that more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Copilot, its AI assistant which has been struck down by the outage.
This is the second disruption to Microsoft’s 365 services this year, raising concerns that repeated failures could push corporate clients to question Microsoft’s reliability.
Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and also in October last year.
Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely look past the outage but that repeated disruptions could hurt Microsoft over time.
‘I think investors will take this in their stride for now, because very few of these customers can realistically walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight,’ Mr Gilbert said.
‘The bigger worry is that this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands.
‘The market will want to see Microsoft prove it can keep the lights on before it asks customers to spend more on Copilot.’
The current outage happened on the same week that Microsoft released a security fix to address an unrelated vulnerability in which hackers could gain access to sign-in information.
That would allow them to impersonate victims and potentially access accounts or workplace systems.
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The Fault Line
If you think the Microsoft Outlook outage is pretty normal, you are definitely very wrong. Read this carefully Most people have no idea what’s coming…
No hackers caused the Microsoft 365 collapse. Microsoft’s own automated health-check system glitched and started killing healthy servers. That triggered a global chain-reaction crash across 450 million commercial seats. For over 9 hours, their emergency fixes failed as rebooted servers died the second traffic returned. Telehealth clinics, payrolls, and government offices froze overnight.
Even OpenAI and Anthropic workplace AI tools went dark at the exact same time.
Now look at what’s coming next. Autonomous AI agents are being wired directly into banking, power grids, and global supply chains. All running on the same 3 centralized cloud monopolies. When an automated script malfunctions next time, it won’t just delay your emails. It will freeze payment networks, lock hospitals out of patient data, and halt deliveries in seconds. We handed critical infrastructure to self-running cloud systems with zero human-speed fail safes.
Yesterday wasn’t a tech glitch. It was a preview.
AI with Soleyman
Microsoft has laid off thousands of people while pouring billions into AI. Then Outlook goes down around the world, and for 10+ hours everyone is waiting on human engineers to bring it back. Now picture those engineers digging through millions of lines of AI-generated code, 3 years of agents shipping straight to production, trying to work out what any of it actually does. Funny how companies keep talking about replacing people, right up until something breaks and they need people to fix it.
Chinese ‘spy’ Alice Huang at center of DOJ probe into another alleged Nvidia smuggling scheme
Ousted Nvidia boss Jensen Huang’s mistress and suspected Chinese spy Alice Huang is being investigated by the Department of Justice (DOJ) over another alleged smuggling operation, it has been revealed.
Federal prosecutors in the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan are investigating whether Alice, 49, was involved in sneaking products made by Super Micro Computer – another Nvidia partner and supplier – into China, sources told Bloomberg News.
The probe is in addition to another DOJ investigation into Alice’s former company, Megaspeed International, over suspected chip smuggling. Megaspeed has denied any wrongdoing.
It’s not the first time Super Micro has been ensnared by smuggling accusations.
In March, co-founder Wally Liaw was charged over an alleged scheme to funnel Nvidia-powered servers to China through a Bangkok company.
Liaw — who is no longer with the company — pleaded not guilty.
Super Micro wasn’t charged and is reportedly cooperating with the investigation, Bloomberg reported.
Megaspeed, meanwhile, has been accused of funneling advanced Nvidia chips to mainland China in violation of US export controls, a charge the company denies.
The rapidly developing scandal broke – and sent Nvidia stocks tumbling – after Jensen, 63, confessed to cheating on his wife of four decades on Sunday.
On Thursday, the New York Times reported Jensen had a second extramarital affair with his subordinate, Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care.
The father-of-two resigned as CEO of the multi-trillion-dollar tech company on Thursday.
Hours later, a third extramarital affair with yet another Nvidia employee came to light.
The employee has not been identified.
Bloomberg reported that Jensen is not a target of federal probes; however, the DOJ is conducting a parallel espionage investigation that includes looking at Alice’s relationship with Jensen, a source familiar with the effort told the outlet.
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