Microsoft 365 Outage Hits Outlook and Teams Worldwide

Microsoft is working to restore access to Outlook, Teams and several other Microsoft 365 services after a disruption that spread across the globe starting Thursday and carried into Friday, according to CNBC Technology. The trouble surfaced just before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. Outlook on web and desktop remained hard to reach for many people, and tools that plug into Outlook, such as Calendar, also faltered.

In a notice issued close to 7 a.m. London time, which is 2 a.m. ET, the company said customers might still fail to reach several 365 products and offered no estimate for when everything would be back. Microsoft stated that it had seen nothing to suggest attackers were behind the incident and said it would keep treating the matter as urgent until it was fully fixed. It promised a fuller account once the fault was brought under control.

Users in Asia lost email and other tools for a large part of their working day, and the problems carried into early hours in Europe. Authorities and companies in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe reported that they were watching the disruption closely. Swiss luxury group Richemont posted its earnings a little late on Friday because of the outage. Workhorse Group, an electric truck maker, moved its third-quarter results from Nov. 12 to Nov. 16, pointing to business interruptions tied to the incident. Air India redirected its email so customer messages would keep arriving and said flights were unaffected.

Microsoft first blamed heavy traffic across several regions. It later traced that pressure to a set of servers dropping offline without warning, which overloaded the machines still running and left some failing automated health checks. Reviews of its servers and regional activity after infrastructure reboots produced only limited improvement, the company said. It is also adding computing capacity through virtual machines. At 4 p.m. ET on Thursday, Microsoft said it had confirmed another way to check service health, which restored some servers, and was rolling that fix out more widely while building automated systems to restart unresponsive machines.

Tony Burke, who handles home affairs and cyber security for Australia, told a press conference that Microsoft sees parallels with the CrowdStrike episode of 2024, when a faulty update knocked out airlines, banks and other organisations, Reuters reported. Amazon said its cloud unit was running normally and blamed an unrelated internet problem for misleading coverage, while Google users also logged issues on Thursday.