New York:A widespread outage in Microsoft services, which began on Thursday, is continuing to disrupt Outlook email and other Microsoft 365 services globally as of Friday morning. Users have reported difficulties accessing their inboxes, sending and receiving messages, and using other organizational tools. The company is actively working to restore services; however, according to its latest update, the issue has not been fully resolved.
According to Maan News Agency, Downdetector, a website that monitors outages of electronic services, reported that the number of incidents involving Outlook software issues in the United States peaked at around 138,000. Reports of outages also emerged from numerous other countries, including those in Europe and Asia, with many users still experiencing problems hours after the initial disruptions.
These outages extended to other Microsoft services, including the Teams enterprise communications platform, the Copilot artificial intelligence service, and other business systems. Despite these issues, Microsoft noted that most core Teams functions, such as calls, chats, and joining meetings, continued to operate normally. The service disruptions are primarily affecting features reliant on the email system, such as calendars, invitations, and meeting scheduling.
Microsoft's tests indicated that a sudden cessation in the operation of a large number of servers led to a redistribution of workload among the remaining servers, complicating their ability to process requests. The company clarified that this unusual load was not necessarily due to an increased number of users but rather a decline in infrastructure readiness.
Throughout the night, Microsoft attempted to restart the affected servers, reroute traffic, and adjust system settings. While some of these actions temporarily restored service in specific areas, the servers often became unresponsive due to overload. Microsoft announced it is exploring additional methods to manage data traffic and improve server stability. At this stage, there is no evidence to suggest the incident was caused by malicious activity. The company plans to release more details about the cause once the issue is resolved.
The outage has affected individual users, businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies that rely on Microsoft cloud services. Notably, Japan's government confirmed an impact on its computing infrastructure. Additionally, services from other tech companies using Microsoft 365 systems were also affected. AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic reported connectivity issues, and US electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the release of its financial reports due to disruptions.
As of Friday morning, Microsoft had not announced when full operations would resume. The company continues efforts to stabilize its infrastructure and gradually restore affected services.