Global outage hits Microsoft Outlook

Microsoft Outlook and other Microsoft 365 applications, including Teams and the AI assistant Copilot, experienced a global outage on Thursday. DW News reported that outage tracker Downdetector received reports from 74 countries and territories within an hour, including nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US shortly after 1 p.m. EST. The disruption also impacted Microsoft 365 connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic.

Microsoft stated that part of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load, which likely contributed to connectivity errors for users attempting to access Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas. The company noted that some restarted servers stopped responding once traffic returned and provided an update at 0254 GMT Friday stating that recent changes had not worked as expected.

The South China Morning Post reported that the outage disrupted employees in Hong Kong’s financial sector on Friday morning, with staff at banks including Goldman Sachs and Nomura experiencing work disruptions. Japan Today and the Bangkok Post both noted that tens of thousands of users struggled to access email during the major global outage.

Brief written by urgent.news from Japan Today, DW News, DW English (Top Stories), South China Morning Post, Bangkok Post — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.