Microsoft hit by global outages: What happened and why?

Microsoft says it has had only “marginal success” in restoring its most widely used workplace services, more than 12 hours after a global outage knocked out Outlook and disrupted Teams and Copilot for users in 74 countries. In a statement on its service health page early on Friday, the company said it was monitoring activity across regions to assess server status and find ways to improve capacity.

“This includes reviewing server performance and confirming that developed patches have been applied and working as intended after infrastructure reboots are completed,” it said. Problems with Microsoft products began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users began reporting that they could not access Outlook, its email platform.

Within about an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. Microsoft first said it was investigating problems in the Americas, but later confirmed that users in any region could be affected.