Microsoft 365 outage disrupts email and government services worldwide

Australia says Microsoft compared the failure to 2024 CrowdStrike bug

From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled with fixing the issue.

Microsoft said in an update Friday that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”

The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”

More than 130,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook earlier on Thursday although new reports have since fallen from that peak.

A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control. Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote.

Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday Microsoft had likened the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024. Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.

“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.

Texas-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike blamed a bug in an update that allowed its systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July 2024 that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.

Government operations were among those affected. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue. The Philippines’ Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its operations, including email responses. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government’s IT infrastructure and that they were “keeping a close eye on the developments.”

Airlines in India reported email disruptions without grounding flights. Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage, but it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption. IndiGo said it also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries, adding in a statement on X that its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.

Businesses felt the disruption directly. U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage. Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company’s Outlook accounts could not receive updates from their U.S. customers due to the outage, and that if the situation dragged on further, this could “impact the production timeline.”

OpenAI and Anthropic each reported that they were facing problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.