Outlook, Teams and other cloud services suffered hours of failures, exposing the operational risks created by dependence on a small number of technology platforms

Thunder Bay – International News Service – A major Microsoft 365 outage disrupted email and communications at companies and government agencies from Asia to the United States, with the company still working Friday to restore all affected services.

Microsoft said the incident affected products that rely on Exchange Online and email infrastructure. Users reported failures involving Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant. About 130,000 reports from dozens of countries were submitted to the Downdetector monitoring service at the peak, though that figure does not represent the total number of affected users.

The company said it had found no indication of malicious activity. Engineers initially reported that recovery measures had not worked as expected, but later said they were seeing early stabilization and improved capacity.

The disruption affected government email in Singapore and parts of the Philippines Supreme Court’s operations. Japan activated alternative communications while officials monitored the outage. In India, airlines diverted customer inquiries to other channels, although flight operations continued.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft compared the incident to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, when a faulty software update disrupted airlines, hospitals, banks and retailers. Microsoft had not confirmed a final cause for the latest failure by the time of publication.

The outage also caused problems for companies using Microsoft’s cloud services as links between other platforms. OpenAI and Anthropic reported difficulties connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, while some businesses warned that disrupted email could delay production or customer support.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 applications. The scale of that customer base means even a partial infrastructure failure can spread rapidly across public services and international business networks.

Sources: Microsoft service-health portal; Microsoft service-health guidance;