A worldwide outage of Microsoft's Outlook email, Teams messaging and Copilot AI assistant that began on Thursday has disrupted businesses, governments and intelligence agencies across 74 countries for more than 15 hours. Al Jazeera

The disruption began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday when users reported they could not access Outlook, and within an hour the outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. Al Jazeera At its peak around 18:00 GMT, Downdetector recorded 138,058 complaints about Outlook in the United States alone. Techmonitor

The failure hit Microsoft 365 services including Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive and the admin center, as well as third-party AI services from OpenAI and Anthropic that rely on Microsoft connectors. eldiario.es Microsoft initially attributed the outage to elevated infrastructure load but later said servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, overloading the remaining infrastructure. eldiario.es

Microsoft said a core process on affected servers became overloaded, causing servers to stop responding and reducing capacity, which diverted traffic to remaining servers and triggered a cascade of failures. Die Presse Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president, said on X: "I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity." Al Jazeera

Government agencies in Australia, Japan, the United States, Singapore, the Philippines and Norway were among those affected. devby.io Australia's spy agency and federal police, the US House of Representatives and Japan's government information infrastructure were hit. devby.io Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported email support failures, while Taiwanese brokerages and insurers experienced disruptions to fund management. devby.io

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the incident resembled the 2024 CrowdStrike outage rather than a cyberattack. Die Presse Microsoft reported only "marginal success" in restoring services, though the Asia-Pacific region has been restored and Europe showed improvement by Friday morning. Al Jazeera The company extended the waiting period for delayed emails to 48 hours. eldiario.es

Security experts warned that the outage created opportunities for phishing attacks and deepfake calls impersonating executives, with criminals sending fake IT support offers. Computer Weekly Microsoft's stock fell 0.4 percent in after-hours trading, and the company scheduled its next status update for 12:00 Spanish time. Die Presse eldiario.es