Microsoft Scrambles to Resolve Worldwide Outage Causing Major Service Disruptions

Microsoft customers around the world faced hours of disruption as the company worked through outages that knocked key services offline and left many unable to communicate.

Downdetector, which tracks user-reported service problems, first recorded a sharp rise in reports involving Microsoft Teams in Ireland and the UK at around 6.15pm yesterday.

By 3am this morning, users were still flagging issues.

The effects quickly stretched beyond any single market. From businesses to government offices, users said they could not send or receive messages through Microsoft Outlook.

Downdetector reported that Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories were affected.

A Downdetector map showed problems spanning the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

The outage hit Microsoft applications such as Outlook

New Zealand was among the countries impacted, with the foreign ministry issuing a notice warning its “ability to receive emails has been affected by the global Microsoft outage.

This also impacts all New Zealand Embassies, Consulates and Representative Offices around the world.”

Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports “in the Americas,” before later confirming the problem appeared to be affecting “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.”

Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription offering that bundles widely used tools including Outlook and Teams.

“We appreciate your organisation’s patience and understanding while we work with urgency to resolve this incident,” Microsoft said.

The company said the disruption extended across multiple products, including Teams instant messaging, the Copilot AI service, Outlook email and elements of its Cloud services, among others.

In a subsequent update, Microsoft said it had managed to bring servers back online multiple times overnight, but those servers had crashed.

Microsoft said efforts to improve serviceability were not progressing ‘as expected’

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported difficulties.

“We’re investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected,” OpenAI said in a statement on its website.

“We’ll share an update when we know more.”

Microsoft said it had attempted several remedies to limit the impact, including isolating sections of its infrastructure and rerouting traffic along alternative paths.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said.

Throughout the incident, Microsoft posted regular updates via official Microsoft 365 accounts.

The company had earlier pointed users to a webpage for the latest information, though some users complained that the page would not load.