Microsoft says 'not aware of any malicious activity' causing Outlook outage
Microsoft said that it was not aware of any “malicious activity” behind the hours-long disruption of its Outlook services. “As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution,” Microsoft said. Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams were disrupted for about 10 hours on…
Microsoft clarified on Friday that it was not aware of any malicious activity responsible for the prolonged outage of its Outlook services. The company stated that it would continue to address the incident with urgency and priority until a resolution was reached. Microsoft's Outlook and Teams services experienced a significant disruption for approximately 10 hours on Friday, as the company worked to resolve issues related to some servers.
The disruption affected businesses and government agencies worldwide that rely on Microsoft's platforms.
Although Microsoft reported that efforts to enhance serviceability were not moving forward as anticipated, it was actively exploring alternate workstreams to increase capacity and manage sustained traffic imbalances. Downdetector, a platform tracking outages, reported more than 25,000 complaints of Outlook problems in the United States at 9:30 p.m. ET (0230 GMT) and noted outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia, and Japan, early Friday local time.
Microsoft's service health notice indicated that features dependent on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements not reliant on Exchange Online continued to function. Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform responsible for email, calendar, contacts, and tasks. Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke stated that Microsoft did not believe they were dealing with a cyberattack, mentioning similarities to a previous issue with CrowdStrike where an update went awry, primarily impacting email systems.
Multiple organizations, including Australia's intelligence agency and federal police, were among those affected by the outage on Friday.
The US House of Representatives reported that the disruption impacted its users, and the company's engineers were collaborating with Microsoft. Microsoft initially attributed the outage to servers being unexpectedly unavailable, rather than increased traffic. They later indicated that restored servers remained stable and were directing traffic to alternate routes while improving the process to bring the remaining impacted servers back online.
As of 6 p.m. ET (2300 GMT), Microsoft observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected to the services.
Written by urgent.news from Dawn's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
