Microsoft has confirmed that a global service outage impacting Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services was not caused by a cyber attack or a sudden surge in users. According to the company, the disruption was triggered when several servers running these services stopped working, causing remaining servers to become overloaded.
The disruption began early Friday in Australian time, which corresponds to late Thursday night in India, and has extended past 10 hours. Microsoft stated that its latest attempted fixes have not functioned as anticipated, and the company is currently unable to provide a timeline for the full restoration of services. Although some servers have been brought back online and certain regions have experienced partial recovery, some restored servers froze again immediately after users logged back in.
A wide range of services has been impacted by the incident, including Outlook email, Teams, SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Intune, and Defender security tools. Downdetector recorded approximately 120,000 global reports for Outlook outages during the early hours of the event. In Australia, organizations affected by the disruption included government agencies, local councils, and Queensland Health.
This event marks the third major outage for Microsoft 365 this year, following similar disruptions in January and August.
