A massive disruption affecting Microsoft’s Outlook email service continues to impact tens of thousands of users worldwide. According to the disruption platform Downdetector, the outage expanded to 74 countries and regions within one hour and also affected other Microsoft services such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot. Microsoft stated on Friday that the measures to resolve the problem were not as hoped.
Initially, Microsoft only investigated outage reports from the USA, but later determined that the connection problems could affect users of Microsoft-365 services in all world regions. A map published by Downdetector showed that the failures impacted users in North and South America, as well as parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. In the USA, the disruption lasted for a large part of the workday on Thursday.
Microsoft announced that a portion of the infrastructure in multiple regions was subjected to increased load, which likely contributed to the connection errors. The company is working “at full speed” to mitigate the effects and is attempting to redirect user traffic away from the affected servers. Despite these efforts, the disruption had not been completely resolved even on Friday morning.
