Microsoft 365 outage continues globally as Outlook and Teams remain disrupted

Microsoft services including Outlook and Teams remained disrupted on Friday as the company worked to restore stability to systems used by businesses and government agencies around the world. In its latest update, Microsoft said efforts to improve serviceability were not progressing as expected. The outage affected users across multiple regions, with reports also emerging from the United States and Asia-Pacific.

Microsoft said it was identifying alternate workstreams that could increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances. The company had earlier said a number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable, and that the problem was not being driven by a surge in traffic. It also said restored servers had remained stable so far, while traffic was being shifted to alternate routes where possible.

Downdetector, which tracks outages through user reports, showed more than 25,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at 9:30pm Eastern Time on Thursday, or 2:30am local time on Friday. At its peak, the site showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US on Thursday. It also recorded outages affecting several Microsoft services in India, Australia and Japan.

Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 that depend on Exchange Online and email were affected, while services that do not rely on Exchange Online remained functional. The disruption matters because Microsoft 365 is widely used for email, calendars, contacts and tasks, making Exchange Online a core part of daily operations for many organisations. The outage has therefore affected not only individual users but also institutions that rely on the platform for internal communication and scheduling.

The impact has been felt across sectors, including government, where continuity of email systems is often essential. In Australia, Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack. He said the company thought the issue was similar to the 2024 CrowdStrike malfunction, in which an update went awry and caused widespread technology disruption.

Burke said the impact was very much on email systems, and added that Australia's spy agency and federal police were among the organisations caught up in the outage. The US House of Representatives also said the outage had affected its users, and that its engineers were working with Microsoft. The incident has highlighted how a fault in a widely used cloud service can quickly spread across countries and institutions.

What remains unclear is how long full recovery will take and whether Microsoft's alternate workstreams will restore normal service without further disruption.

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