A global outage in Microsoft 365 services is continuing for a second day. Users around the world are complaining about the unavailability of Outlook email, the corporate messenger Teams and the AI assistant Copilot. According to the company, the outage has affected a wide range of work tools used daily by hundreds of millions of people.
Microsoft said it sees "encouraging progress" in recovery. According to it, service availability and email delivery are improving across a growing part of the affected infrastructure. "Sustained improvements" have been noted in North America and Europe, and "encouraging recovery signals" in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time, some users may still experience "intermittent access issues or email delivery delays."
The exact number of those affected is unknown. In January the company said it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to Microsoft 365. Microsoft's headquarters is in Redmond, Washington state.
The company said it has no information that malicious activity caused the outage. According to it, the incident will be addressed "urgently and as a priority until fully resolved." In a series of 20 posts on social network X, the company described how engineers are trying to bring the problem under control. One post said the changes are "not going as expected."
The outage has affected more than businesses. In Britain, in Manchester, Judge Maurice Greene dismissed jurors because of delays which, he said, showed the danger of the court's dependence on technology. British police said they cannot accept crime reports online and urged people to call emergency services if urgent. The National Pharmacy Association warned of possible delays in dispensing prescriptions: the outage affected the email systems of the state-run National Health Service (NHS).
In Norway the outage affected "several ministries," including loss of access to email. There is no word on when the problem will be resolved. In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft compared the situation to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024, caused by a faulty update to Windows computers. At that time flights were canceled and hospitals, banks and shops were disrupted. According to Burke, Microsoft does not believe it is dealing with a cyberattack and leans toward the version of an update that went wrong.
In Hong Kong, businessman Danny Lau, owner of an aluminum company, said his firm is not receiving updates from American clients via Outlook. If the situation drags on, it could "affect the production schedule." Some operations are also disrupted at some banks in Hong Kong. Airlines Air India and IndiGo reported disruptions to their email support services but said flights are operating on schedule. Singapore government services and the Supreme Court of the Philippines also reported email disruptions.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the government's IT infrastructure was affected and the authorities are closely monitoring the situation, using alternative means of communication such as telephones. American industrial company Workhorse Group Inc. postponed a conference call on quarterly results. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the chain-reaction effect: more and more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies' programs.