Microsoft services, including Outlook and Teams, remained disrupted for around 10 hours on Thursday as the company struggled to resolve server-related problems, affecting businesses and government agencies across the world.
In its latest update, Microsoft said its efforts to restore services were not progressing as expected, reports Reuters.
The company said it was exploring alternative ways to increase capacity amid persistent imbalances in traffic management.
Downdetector, an outage-tracking platform that collects user reports from multiple sources, recorded more than 25,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at 9:30pm ET on Thursday (0230 GMT Friday).
The platform also reported disruptions to several Microsoft services across the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, in the early hours of Friday local time.
At the peak of the disruption, Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook-related problems in the US at around 1pm ET on Thursday.
In a service health notice, Microsoft said several features of Microsoft 365 that rely on Exchange Online and email services had been affected. However, functions that do not depend on Exchange Online continued to operate.
Exchange Online is Microsoft’s cloud-based messaging service that supports email, calendars, contacts and tasks.
Email systems bear the brunt
Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed the disruption was not caused by a cyberattack.
“They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said at a press conference.
He added that the impact was largely concentrated on email systems.
Australia’s intelligence agency and federal police were among the organisations affected by the outage on Friday.
The reference to CrowdStrike relates to the 2024 software malfunction that triggered one of the world’s largest digital disruptions, affecting hospitals, banks and airports and exposing the vulnerability of interconnected technology systems.
The US House of Representatives also reported that its users had been affected, with its engineers working alongside Microsoft to address the problem.
Earlier, Microsoft said several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, stressing that the disruption was not caused by increased traffic.
The company subsequently reported that restored servers were remaining stable. It said it was redirecting traffic through alternative routes wherever possible while working to bring the remaining affected servers back online.
Microsoft had earlier cautioned that service recovery could take time as users’ applications reconnected to the restored systems.
At 6pm ET (2300 GMT) on Thursday, the company reported limited improvements, with users gradually reconnecting to its services.
OpenAI, Anthropic also report connector issues
The disruption also affected connections to other technology platforms.
OpenAI said it was investigating problems with its Microsoft connectors, warning that new connections could fail and some tools might not function as expected.
Anthropic also reported an issue with an upstream provider that was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The latest disruption came after Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform suffered an outage last month, affecting its productivity software and businesses across several industries worldwide.
The impact also extended to corporate operations. Electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed the release of its third-quarter financial results, originally scheduled for November 12, to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.
