MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Microsoft restores services after a global outage hit Outlook and Teams in more than 70 countries

In Australia, the outage affected the tax office, some courts, the Federal Police, the ASIO intelligence agency and the New South Wales state services platform

Microsoft said on Friday its services were recovering after a global outage that began on Thursday afternoon, European time, and for hours affected millions of users in more than 70 countries, including public bodies in Australia and Japan. The company ruled out a cyberattack.

The disruption hit Outlook email, the Teams work platform, SharePoint Online, the Copilot artificial intelligence assistant, the OneDrive and OneNote cloud services and the Microsoft 365 suite, widely used by businesses and governments. “We’re seeing continued progress in recovery across affected regions,” the company said, warning that some users could still experience intermittent problems. “We know our customers rely on our services to do important work every day, and we’re sorry for the impact these outages had,” it added.

“At this time, I can confirm there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice-president for Copilot, Agents and Platforms, wrote on X. According to the company, several servers unexpectedly became unavailable and their load shifted to the remaining ones, in a domino effect that overwhelmed systems linked to Exchange Online, its email service. There is still no definitive analysis of what happened.

In Australia, the outage affected the tax office, some courts, the Federal Police, the ASIO intelligence agency and the New South Wales state services platform. Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke activated a clause in the digital resilience agreement signed with Microsoft in June so that the country would receive priority in restoring services. In Japan, government spokesman Minoru Kihara confirmed that the government’s IT infrastructure was also disrupted, with no incidents at health facilities. Problems were reported in public services in Singapore and the Philippines, and in Thailand four major banks temporarily suspended email-dependent services.

Complaints on the Downdetector platform peaked first on Thursday afternoon, European time, and a second wave came on Friday morning, before returning to normal levels in the afternoon. According to the company, Microsoft 365 has more than 450 million corporate users and 95 million consumers, and Teams more than 320 million.