Microsoft outage drags on for hours, disrupting Outlook, Teams for businesses and governments

Microsoft experienced a prolonged outage affecting its Outlook and Teams services on Friday, disrupting businesses and government agencies worldwide. The tech giant struggled to fix issues with servers, with efforts to improve serviceability not progressing as expected. Microsoft identified alternate workstreams to increase capacity amidst sustained traffic management imbalances.

Reports of Outlook problems reached over 25,000 in the US by 9:30 p.m. ET, while India, Australia, and Japan also faced outages. At its peak, over 130,000 US reports of Outlook issues were logged around 1 p.m. ET. Exchange Online, the company's cloud-based messaging platform, was impacted, while non-Exchange Online elements remained functional.

Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke stated that the issue, similar to the CrowdStrike malfunction of 2024, was related to an update gone awry, affecting email systems. The Australian spy agency and federal police were among the affected organizations. The US House of Representatives reported that the outage impacted its users, and Microsoft engineers were working with them.

Microsoft attributed the issue to unexpectedly unavailable servers and noted that restored servers remained stable, with traffic being shifted to alternate routes to bring impacted servers back online.