Microsoft battles to fix global Outlook outage

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WASHINGTON: Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to fix a major Outlook outage were not working as expected and that it was looking for alternative solutions, as users around…

WASHINGTON: Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to fix a major Outlook outage were not working as expected and that it was looking for alternative solutions, as users around the world were left without its key services.

The hours-long disruption, which Microsoft blamed on “elevated load” on its infrastructure, has hit email as well as products such as Teams and its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Copilot.

The outage was felt worldwide, with users ranging from companies to governments reporting that they were unable to communicate via Outlook.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said on X. “We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity,” it added, without saying when full service was expected to be restored.

The disruption spread worldwide within an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported. A map it posted on X showed users affected across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

In New Zealand, the foreign ministry said its “ability to receive emails has been affected by the global Microsoft outage. This also impacts all New Zealand Embassies, Consulates and Representative Offices around the world.”

Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports “in the Americas”, but later confirmed the issue appeared to affect “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region”. Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription service that includes Outlook and Teams.

“We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” the company said. “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”

Thousands of users also reported problems with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector, which showed a sharp drop in reports of disruption…

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