Microsoft Outage Halts Global Email and Government Services

A widespread technical failure at Microsoft has shut down core communication services for millions of users. The outage, which started on Thursday and continued into Friday, interrupted Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot AI assistant. The disruption affected businesses and government bodies on multiple continents.

The incident began with a faulty update, according to company officials. Microsoft engineers reported that initial fixes did not work as planned. The company admitted on Friday that service health had not fully restored, despite earlier claims. Downdetector logged roughly 130,000 user reports from dozens of countries on Thursday. The number of new reports has dropped since that peak.

Microsoft 365 supports more than 430 million people globally. The company stated that the issue stems from a bad software update rather than a cyberattack. It is treating the incident with high priority while it works to stabilize the infrastructure.

Businesses faced immediate operational hurdles. Workhorse Group Inc., a U.S. industrial technology firm, delayed its quarterly earnings call. In Hong Kong, Danny Lau, an aluminum business owner, said his company could not receive email updates from U.S. customers. This delay threatened production timelines. Local banks in the region also reported partial disruptions to their operations.

Government agencies around the world reported similar problems. Tony Burke, the Australian Minister for Home Affairs, said Microsoft compared the scale of this failure to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage. Burke spoke with Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the national cybersecurity coordinator to discuss the situation.

In Singapore, the Government Technology Agency confirmed that government emails were down. The agency is working directly with Microsoft to fix the issue. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage affected government IT infrastructure. Japanese authorities secured alternative communication tools, including telephones, to maintain operations.

The Philippines' Supreme Court stated that the outage affected some of its operations, specifically email responses. In the aviation sector, Air India reported that its flight operations remained unaffected. The airline temporarily rerouted email services to ensure customer queries were still received. IndiGo, another Indian carrier, noted disruptions to its email support channels but said other support methods remained operational.

The failure also impacted the artificial intelligence sector. OpenAI and Anthropic both reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools. Microsoft continues to monitor the situation as it works to stabilize its systems. The company said it saw early signs of stabilization and capacity improvements by Friday.