‘Looks like we’ll have to talk to people’: Australia sent back to time before email with major Microsoft outage

A widespread outage on Thursday disrupted Microsoft platforms including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot. Microsoft attributed the connectivity errors to elevated load on its infrastructure, which affected Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users across multiple regions including the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. According to Downdetector, the disruption reached 74 countries and territories.

The Korea Times reported that the outage lasted more than five hours for thousands of users and also hit connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic AI services. While reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 around 1 p.m. ET, they had fallen significantly by the evening. Microsoft stated it was working to return affected servers to service and had observed limited recovery as users reconnected.

Regarding the impact on Queensland, the health and ambulance services minister stated that no disruption to patient care or hospital service delivery has been detected, and the Triple Zero service remains unaffected, according to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Brief written by urgent.news from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Malay Mail, NPR, The Korea Times — 5 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.