Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot in 74 countries
Microsoft experienced a widespread outage on Thursday that disrupted access to Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI assistant for users in 74 countries and territories. The problem began in the Americas but spread globally within about an hour, affecting regions across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Because Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based service, the incident affected users trying to connect to widely used workplace applications, particularly email and collaboration tools.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure loads across multiple regions. The company said it had paused deployments, redirected traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarted servers as it worked to reduce the impact. In the United States, roughly 130,000 users reported Outlook problems shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern Time, or 1800 GMT, according to Downdetector. That figure had fallen to about 37,000 by 6 p.m. Eastern Time, while thousands more reported difficulties with Teams and Copilot.
Despite repeated updates, Microsoft said it had achieved only limited recovery several hours into the incident. The company warned that service might return gradually as capacity was restored and users’ applications reconnected.
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