Australia's spy agency, federal police hit by Microsoft outage

A widespread outage struck Microsoft platforms, including the popular email service Outlook, on Thursday, leaving many users unable to access their accounts or use other apps, according to the Associated Press. Nearly 130,000 users reported issues on outage tracker Downdetector shortly after 1 p.m. ET. The problem persisted as reports of difficulties sending and receiving emails, as well as trouble loading inboxes, continued to surface.

Microsoft confirmed it was investigating disruptions, particularly affecting its email and Teams applications, as well as its AI assistant Copilot and broader Microsoft 365 services. The tech giant acknowledged elevated load on some of its infrastructure, leading to connectivity errors. Microsoft determined that certain servers were unexpectedly unavailable due to a failure during automated health checks.

The company was testing a fix and rolling out an alternative method for these checks to restore the affected servers. Microsoft reported success in restoring problems related to Teams in North America, but some users still faced connectivity issues.