Microsoft outage: Airlines issue advisory; Australia's spy agency, police impacted

Microsoft's services, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, experienced widespread disruptions on Friday, spilling into Asia-Pacific business hours. The tech giant blamed server issues for the outage, which affected thousands of US users and extended to government agencies in Australia, Japan, and the United States, as well as companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. This was the second outage to Microsoft's 365 services this year, raising concerns about corporate clients questioning Microsoft's reliability.

Microsoft attempted to rectify the problem by making adjustments to the affected servers, but these efforts did not result in a sustained recovery. The company stated it was reviewing further actions to improve overall infrastructure stability. Downdetector reported over 18,000 Outlook problems in the US, along with outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia, and Japan.

Microsoft's 365 services experienced issues related to Exchange Online and email features, while other elements remained functional. The company did not suspect any malicious activity causing the outage. Australian officials dismissed the possibility of a cyberattack, attributing the disruption to an update that had gone awry. The incident impacted organizations like Australia's spy agency and federal police.

The US House of Representatives confirmed that the outage affected its users, and engineers were collaborating with Microsoft. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with Microsoft connectors, and Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air experienced disruptions to their email support services. Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers, and investment trust companies also felt the impact, with one company even canceling a bond repurchase agreement transaction.

Industry analyst Josh Gilbert noted that investors were likely to accept the outage for now, but repeated disruptions could ultimately lead to concerns about Microsoft's reliability. The market will await evidence of Microsoft's ability to maintain service stability before considering increased investments in its Copilot offerings. Microsoft had previously faced outages in its 365 services in January and a cloud platform outage in October last year.