Major Outage Affects Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and Other Microsoft Services
Tens of thousands of users worldwide are experiencing a global outage of Microsoft services, including the Outlook email client, the Teams video conferencing service, and the Copilot AI chatbot, the BBC reports .
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All of these services, according to the corporation, are suffering from connectivity issues. According to Microsoft's current assessment, it is unlikely that these issues are caused by a cyberattack.
According to data from the monitoring service Downdetector, issues with Microsoft applications were reported in 74 countries within a single hour. They continue to persist, more than eight hours later.
According to figures on Microsoft's website, 430 million people worldwide use its Microsoft 365 suite.
Microsoft stated that it has released an update, but its deployment is taking longer than expected.
The company reported that its servers across multiple regions are experiencing "increased load." This means that the volume of requests exceeds what the servers are capable of processing.
Services like Outlook may run noticeably slower: emails, attachments, and calendar entries may take a long time to open or may fail to display in the inbox. Prompts in Copilot may process slowly or fail to process within the allotted time.
The outage also impacted several third-party services not owned by Microsoft. OpenAI and Anthropic reported issues with their products (large language models) specifically where they integrate with Microsoft products.
Australia's Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security, Tony Burke, stated that he had spoken with Microsoft representatives in his country. According to him, they "do not believe they are dealing with a cyber incident."
Some analysts remarked that if there was no cyberattack, what is happening should be termed "incredible incompetence," as put by Paul Spain from the New Zealand consulting firm Gorilla Technology.
Companies have effectively "lost a working day," he fumed.