Microsoft Outage Disrupts Global Business and Government Services
A failure in Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, forced companies and agencies to reroute communications and delay events.
By Jillian Foster ·
A widespread technical failure struck Microsoft services on Thursday, disrupting operations across Asia, the United States, and Europe.
Microsoft confirmed that the outage affected multiple Microsoft 365 products linked to Exchange Online and email infrastructure. Users reported that Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot AI assistant were inaccessible for several hours. The company stated it was employing a measured approach to identify and repair the affected infrastructure while noting it had no indication of malicious activity.
The disruption forced organizations to adjust their daily operations in response to the loss of connectivity. Workhorse Group Inc., an industrial technology company based in the US, delayed its quarterly earnings conference call. In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told reporters that Microsoft compared the incident to the CrowdStrike outage of 2024, suggesting a faulty update was the likely cause rather than a cyberattack. Burke noted that he had spoken with Microsoft executives and the national cybersecurity coordinator regarding the global disruption.
Government bodies around the world reported specific impacts on their IT systems. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government emails were down while it worked with Microsoft to resolve the issue. The Philippines’ Supreme Court stated that the outage affected operations, including email responses. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the government’s IT infrastructure was impacted and that officials were monitoring the developments closely.
The outage also rippled into the airline and technology sectors. Air India stated that its flight operations were unaffected, but the company temporarily rerouted email services to handle customer queries. IndiGo, another Indian carrier, reported disruptions to its email support channels while maintaining other support methods. OpenAI and Anthropic each reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, illustrating how the failure affected AI platforms that rely on Microsoft software.
Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 user reports of Outlook issues on Thursday, though the volume of new reports declined as the day progressed. Microsoft engineers posted on X that they were struggling to fully control the problem, noting that changes applied to improve serviceability were not taking as expected. A businessperson in Hong Kong said his aluminum firm could not receive updates from US customers, which threatened production timelines if the issue persisted.
