Microsoft outage disrupts global businesses, government services as recovery efforts falter

A prolonged Microsoft outage disrupted businesses, airlines and government operations across several countries on Friday, knocking out access to widely used services including Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot, as the technology giant struggled to restore normal operations hours after the disruption began.

The company said the incident affected multiple Microsoft 365 products connected to its Exchange Online and email infrastructure. Users across Asia and the United States reported difficulties accessing the services, with the disruption also spilling over into organisations that rely on Microsoft's software for internal communication and customer support.

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Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, said its engineers were investigating the cause and attempting different recovery measures. The company described its response as a "measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure."

It added that there was no indication of malicious activity behind the disruption, pledging to treat the incident "with urgency and priority until full resolution."

Recovery efforts face fresh setbacks

The scale of the disruption was reflected in reports submitted to outage-tracking platform Downdetector. More than 130,000 users flagged problems accessing Outlook on Thursday, although the number of fresh complaints subsequently declined.

Microsoft's updates on X indicated that restoring services was proving more complicated than initially expected. After announcing that service health and functionality had been successfully restored, the company said it had revised the list of affected services and was continuing its remediation efforts.

In its latest update, Microsoft acknowledged that the changes introduced to improve service availability were not delivering the expected results.

"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," the company said.

The disruption also affected corporate schedules. US-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. postponed its quarterly earnings conference call because of the outage.

Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had drawn parallels between the incident and the global technology disruption caused by CrowdStrike in 2024. Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft's senior executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator about the situation.

"They (Microsoft) don't believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke told reporters in Sydney.

The CrowdStrike incident in July 2024 was triggered by a faulty software update that pushed erroneous data to millions of customer computers. The resulting disruption grounded flights and affected television broadcasts, banks, hospitals and retailers worldwide.

Also read: Microsoft outage disrupts Teams, Outlook and Copilot as efforts fail to ensure sustained service restoration

Airlines, government agencies report disruptions

The outage had varying consequences for organisations across Asia, with several reporting problems involving email communications and internal operations.

In Hong Kong, businessman Danny Lau, who operates an aluminium company, said his firm's Outlook accounts were unable to receive updates from customers in the United States. A prolonged disruption could "impact the production timeline", he said.

Indian airlines also reported difficulties with their email systems, although flight operations remained unaffected. Air India said it had temporarily redirected its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption.

IndiGo said disruptions to its email support services had affected its ability to receive customer queries. However, the airline said its other customer support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.

Singapore's Government Technology Agency confirmed that government email services were down and said it was working with Microsoft to resolve the problem.

The Philippines' Supreme Court said the continuing Microsoft 365 disruption had affected some of its operations, including responses to emails. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the country's government IT infrastructure had also been affected and that authorities were "keeping a close eye on the developments."

The disruption extended beyond organisations directly dependent on Microsoft's productivity software. Artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic separately reported difficulties connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, demonstrating how problems with widely used enterprise platforms can affect interconnected services across the technology industry.


(With inputs from AP)