-Published on the website of Germany’s state broadcaster DW-
A global outage of Microsoft services, including Outlook and Teams, has caused problems for businesses and government institutions worldwide. Microsoft is trying to solve the problem.
Microsoft’s cloud services, including the Outlook email service, have faced major technical problems for hours. Companies and government institutions worldwide have been affected, as have private users of Microsoft services.
Downdetector, the platform that monitors technical problems, reports that the outage spread worldwide in a very short time and caused disruption to Microsoft services in 74 countries and regions.
No signs of “malicious activity”
According to Microsoft, measures taken overnight between Thursday and Friday “did not produce the expected results.” The company is looking for alternative ways to increase server capacity. The outage mainly affected functions of the Microsoft 365 suite based on the Exchange Online email platform, which runs in the cloud.
Microsoft currently sees no signs that the global disruption to the operation of its products is the result of “malicious activity.”
Initially, it was thought that the problems had spread only in America. Later, the American software giant announced that connection problems could affect Microsoft 365 users worldwide. Thousands of reports of outages were also recorded for the Microsoft Teams communications service and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot. Both applications are part of Microsoft’s cloud offering, Microsoft 365.
Outages also hit intelligence services
The outage also affected sensitive government systems. In Australia, the intelligence service and federal police reported outages. The government in Canberra activated an agreement with Microsoft to ensure priority restoration of systems. Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Tony Burke, said Microsoft does not believe it was a cyberattack.
Apparently, the cause was a faulty update, similar to the one that caused the global IT outage involving security company CrowdStrike in 2024. The U.S. House of Representatives also reported restrictions in the operation of its systems.
The effects were also felt in the economy. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic have investigated problems with interfaces linked to Microsoft services, which were not working as expected. American electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group has delayed the publication of its quarterly results due to IT problems.
“Limited improvement” – problems continue
According to Microsoft, “part of the infrastructure in several regions was experiencing increased load.” This “likely contributed to connection errors,” the company announced on social network X. “We are making maximum efforts to find all options to mitigate the consequences.”
The company later said that only “limited improvement” had been recorded. Efforts were being made to redirect user traffic away from affected servers. “Once capacity is restored, the situation for users should improve gradually,” the statement said.
The company says it is working at full capacity to resolve the problems./DW/