Microsoft outage: Global disruption reigns as fixes 'not taking'

Some workers are frustrated at a lost work day, while others are celebrating an early weekend

Microsoft is working to mitigate a widespread outage that appears to impact Teams, Copilot and other popular products and services.

Microsoft began investigating reports of outages at 15:40 GMT yesterday, when they appeared to be limited to North America. It said "customer impact" was fully restored at 17:09.

But then, at 17:54, Microsoft posted again. This time it said it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” with Exchange appearing to suffer a separate issue from Teams.

At 18:07, the company wrote on social media that "the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region," and shortly afterwards began redistributing connection traffic across global infrastructure.

A cyberattack was swiftly ruled out. At 19:31, Microsoft said it had determined that “the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”

“We're working to safely return them to service,” the vendor posted to X.

Paul Spain of New Zealand-based advisory firm Gorilla Technology told the BBC that, if not a cyberattack, the issue instead stems from "incredible incompetence."

What is Microsoft doing to fix it?

Microsoft said at 03:21 that its attempts to fix the issue were "not taking as expected."

There were some encouraging signs around 8am, when it said it was "seeing positive results" for service stability and began to roll out its fixes more widely.

At 9:30 it posted to say there were "early signs of stabilisation", but service capacity has "not yet returned to normal levels."

The issue is still live at the time of writing. The Computing team hasn't received any emails since 17:47 last night, which is unheard of.

Once the issue is fixed, we expect a flood of emails ironically commenting on the outage that prevented them from getting through in the first place.

This has also hampered our efforts to get comment from affected firms, many of which no longer provide phone numbers for their press teams.

Disruption reigns worldwide

The issue began during the US workday, and at the start of Asia's.

For many Indians coming back from a Diwali break, it will have been a rough return to work.

Schools and government services in Australia, Japan, India and more are affected.

With the UK now waking up as well, we are receiving (well, hunting down) statements from major organisations.

A parliamentary spokesperson says "alternative communication arrangements are in place," while an NHS doctor told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the outage will be "very disruptive."

Operations at British intelligence services and airports have so far not been affected.

With more than 430 million people using Microsoft 365, the impact on global productivity has already been immense.

Some are bemoaning the prospect of a wasted workday, while others have called the lack of incoming email "absolute bliss."

Computing says:

After the wholehearted leap into cloud in the 2010s, the world has been waking up to the vulnerabilities it introduces in this decade.

While the infrastructure is technically distributed and resilient, that doesn't mean much if the problem is rooted in software.

This outage, even though not caused by a cyberattack, will undoubtedly strengthen calls for more resilience, greater sovereignty and more vendor diversification around the world.