Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook and Teams for businesses and governments worldwide
A server issue caused a roughly 10-hour outage of Microsoft Outlook, Teams and related services on Thursday, affecting users in multiple regions and prompting statements from officials and companies.
Microsoft reported that server problems caused a disruption of Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services for about 10 hours on Thursday, affecting businesses and government agencies globally. The company said it was working to increase capacity and shift traffic to alternate routes while restoring the affected servers.
Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook issues in the United States at the peak of the outage and thousands of reports across the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan. Microsoft indicated that features relying on Exchange Online were impacted, while components that do not depend on that service remained operational.
"They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry," Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke told reporters, adding that the problem was largely affecting e-mail systems.
The U.S. House of Representatives confirmed that its members experienced the outage and that its engineers were cooperating with Microsoft. OpenAI and Anthropic both said they were investigating issues with Microsoft 365 connectors that may have been affected by the outage.
Electric-vehicle manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed its earnings release, citing business disruptions linked to the global Microsoft outage.