Microsoft rules out cyberattack as global outage hits Outlook, Teams and Copilot

As a global outage continued to disrupt Microsoft's services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, the company's executive vice-president Charles Lamanna on Friday ruled out malicious or cyber activity as the cause, even as efforts to restore normal operations faced fresh hurdles.

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"We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue. We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity," Lamanna, the company's EVP of Copilot, Agents, and Platform said in a post on X.


His statement comes as Microsoft grapples with a widespread disruption that began on Thursday, leaving users across several countries unable to access Outlook inboxes, send or receive emails and use other Microsoft 365 services.

The outage has affected multiple products, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint and OneDrive, disrupting businesses, government departments and other organisations that rely on Microsoft's cloud-based services.

Microsoft's efforts to restore services have also encountered difficulties. In its latest update, the company said that changes introduced to improve service availability were not working as expected, prompting it to explore alternative measures to increase capacity and address traffic management imbalances.

The company has also reported problems with servers becoming unresponsive after being brought back into service and receiving traffic, complicating its recovery efforts.

At the peak of the disruption, Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook-related problems, highlighting the scale of the outage.

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The disruption has also spilled over to other technology platforms. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with their Microsoft 365 connectors, affecting certain integrations and tools that depend on Microsoft's services.