Microsoft said on Friday that a global outage affecting its Microsoft 365 services was caused by "elevated load" on its infrastructure. A large number of servers became "unexpectedly unavailable," the company said. It ruled out a cyber attack, according to BBC News.
The affected services include Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot. Microsoft said its attempted fixes had so far shown only "marginal success." Engineers were continuing to monitor server status across regions to determine further actions, BBC News reported.
Monitoring site Downdetector recorded nearly 140,000 user reports from 74 countries at the peak on Thursday evening, BBC News said. The company says more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps worldwide.
The disruption extended to third-party AI providers. OpenAI and Anthropic both reported issues with their connections to Microsoft's services, BBC News said. Government agencies including the Singaporean government and Australia's spy agency also reported impacts, The Independent reported.
Australian cyber-security expert Troy Hunt told BBC News the outage showed how critical email remains, hitting people's ability to work, communicate about appointments, purchase items needing verification, and create or access accounts and services.
Paul Spain of New Zealand advisory firm Gorilla Technology said companies had effectively "lost a business day."
The outage follows a separate Exchange Online disruption on Thursday that cut off Outlook mailboxes for users in the Americas, as GlobeTV reported.