A massive Microsoft outage has disrupted access to Outlook emails, Teams meetings and other essential workplace services, leaving millions of users around the world struggling to work.
The disruption, which began around midday on the US East Coast on Thursday, has affected Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and its artificial intelligence platform Copilot.
In the United States, some frustrated office workers reportedly left work early after losing access to their email systems, while others turned to alternative communication platforms such as Slack and telephone calls.
The impact has also been felt in Australia, where businesses were unable to print invoices, some schools struggled to conduct online classes and courts lost access to live feeds.
Some job seekers reportedly missed virtual interviews because they could not connect to online meetings, while distribution centres experienced supply-related disruptions.
Microsoft attributed the outage to several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, placing additional pressure on its remaining infrastructure.
In updates posted on X, the company initially reported positive progress in restarting affected infrastructure and restoring server availability.
However, in a subsequent update at 3:13 a.m. GMT on Friday, Microsoft said changes implemented to improve services were not producing the expected results.
The company said it was exploring alternative measures to increase capacity and address persistent traffic management imbalances.
At around 3:30 a.m. GMT on Friday, the disruption remained widespread, with users continuing to report difficulties accessing Microsoft's services.
The outage monitoring website Downdetector recorded nearly 140,000 reports of Outlook problems globally at around 6 p.m. GMT on Thursday.
Microsoft warned that even services that had initially been restored could become unresponsive again, with customers in different regions potentially affected.
The disruption has also affected other technology companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, which rely on Microsoft's infrastructure. OpenAI confirmed it was investigating connectivity problems affecting some of its tools.
In Australia, schools reportedly asked parents to communicate student absences by telephone or text message, while some businesses resorted to alternative systems to maintain operations.
Microsoft has apologised for the disruption and urged customers to follow updates on its service health status page as engineers work to restore normal operations.
There has been no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack.
