A global outage lasting roughly twelve hours disrupted several key Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The incident began on Thursday in the United States and extended into the Asia–Pacific workday on Friday. According to Downdetector, at the peak of the disruption more than 130,000 reports about Outlook failures came from the United States on Thursday afternoon; by Friday morning widespread outages were reported in India, Australia and Japan.
Services affected
Microsoft said the issue impacted functions that depend on Exchange Online, the cloud-based email and calendar service. The company started reconfiguring affected servers and increased infrastructure capacity in multiple regions to handle traffic, but initial interventions produced only partial, temporary improvement.
Impact on governments and businesses
The outage affected both government agencies and large companies. It disrupted IT systems in the US House of Representatives and Japan’s government IT systems, and also reached Australian intelligence and the federal police. Because of the severity, the Australian government activated its cybersecurity agreement with Microsoft, which guarantees priority in service restoration for the country.
Commercially, the disruption had tangible effects: OpenAI and Anthropic reported issues related to Microsoft integrations, while Indian carriers IndiGo and Akasa Air experienced interruptions in customer-service email. In Taiwan, brokers, life insurers and investment funds were affected; one firm had to cancel a pre-scheduled bond buyback. The electric truck maker Workhorse Group delayed the release of its third-quarter results by four days, citing the global outage.
Causes and official statements
Microsoft stated it had no indication of malicious activity causing the outage. Tony Burke, Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, also said the incident was not a cyberattack; he suggested that, similar to the 2024 global CrowdStrike incident, a faulty software update could have been responsible and that mail systems were primarily impacted.
Consequences and trust issues
This is the second major Microsoft 365 disruption this year: the company’s services also experienced outages in January and last October, and an Azure fault last month caused global disturbances in office software operation. Analysts warn that repeated failures could erode customer confidence: while clients cannot quickly abandon the Microsoft ecosystem, IT decision-makers may rethink how many business processes to consolidate with a single provider and whether to increase spending on services such as Copilot.
Microsoft’s share price showed a modest decline—0.7%—in overseas trading at the close referenced by the report. The company is investigating the precise cause and continuing recovery efforts.
An AI assistant contributed to preparing this article; the final content was edited and verified by our journalist. Tags: Microsoft, cybersecurity, software, Reuters, Azure, OpenAI, outage, Outlook, CrowdStrike, technical fault.
