What Microsoft said on security

Addressing the security question, the company said on Friday it had not found any malicious activity causing the outage, and instead blamed elevated infrastructure loads.

In an update, Microsoft explained what it believed was happening. "We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company said, adding it was aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce the impact.

Scale of the disruption

The Microsoft Outlook outage was global in reach. Outage tracker Downdetector reported the disruption went global within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories.

• •Email was hit, along with products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.
• •Thousands of users reported issues with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector.
• •A map posted by Downdetector on X showed affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports in the Americas, then confirmed 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 applications such as Outlook and Teams.

Who was affected

The disruption reached businesses and government agencies that rely on the popular work platforms. In New Zealand, the foreign ministry said its ability to receive emails had been affected by the global Microsoft outage, and that this also impacted all New Zealand Embassies, Consulates and Representative Offices around the world.

Repair efforts and recovery signs

Repair work stretched on for hours. On Thursday, Microsoft said efforts to fix the outage were not going as expected and that it was seeking alternative solutions. "We're identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity," the company added, noting that changes applied to improve serviceability were not taking as expected.

Shortly after 6pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT), Microsoft said it was "observing limited recovery" as it routed user traffic away from affected servers. "As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," the company said.

Microsoft posted a series of updates on X detailing continued but unsuccessful efforts to restore full service as the outage dragged on. The company did not say when service was expected to be fully restored. Downdetector, however, showed a sharp decline around 0450 GMT in users' reports of disruptions in Washington and Hong Kong.