Microsoft Outage Spreads Across 74 Countries: What Went Wrong and Why

Outlook, Teams and Copilot are still struggling in 74 countries. Microsoft admits its repair work has brought only “marginal success” so far.

Microsoft says it has achieved only “marginal success” in restoring its most popular workplace tools. More than 12 hours have passed since the Microsoft outage began. It knocked out Outlook and disrupted Teams and Copilot for users in 74 countries.

The company posted an update on its service health page early on Friday. It said engineers were watching activity across regions to check server status and find ways to boost 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.

Here is what we know about the Microsoft outage, what caused it and when services could return.

How did the Microsoft outage begin?

Trouble started at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday. Users began reporting that they could not open Outlook, the company’s email platform. Within roughly an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories.

Microsoft first said it was investigating problems in the Americas. It later confirmed that users in any region could be hit. The company said the affected infrastructure was under elevated load across several regions. That was likely adding to the connectivity errors.

Later, Microsoft said a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable. It added that a surge in traffic had not caused the elevated load.

The disruption dragged on through the US working day and into the night. By Friday morning in Europe, it was still not fixed. Servers that Microsoft had brought back were failing again.

Rupert Goodwins, a technology analyst and journalist, shared his view. “I don’t think it’s unprecedented. I mean, the scale is impressive,” he said. “It’s very embarrassing for Microsoft and really, really annoying for the rest of us.”

How many people feel the impact?

Microsoft has not confirmed how many users are affected. Downdetector offers a partial picture. People use the site to report problems with online services.

At about 07:00 GMT on Friday, the site had logged at least 43,000 Outlook problem reports. They came from users in 72 countries. The real number is likely far higher. The count only includes people who visit the site to report an issue.

“There’s about 430 million people who use Microsoft services,” said Walter Pasquarelli, an affiliate researcher at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and an AI specialist. “What we do know so far is that this is first and foremost a communication risk.”

Government systems in Singapore and Japan faced disruption. So did communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines. In Australia, the national spy agency and the federal police were among those hit.

Which Microsoft tools are down?

Outlook took the hardest hit. Users said they could not open their mailboxes on the web, in the app or on mobile devices. Many emails that did go through arrived late.

Other services were partly disrupted. The trouble also spread beyond Microsoft’s own products. It hit integrations that other companies rely on, including the AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic.

“For the most part, we don’t really think about it too much, a little bit like our health, that we kind of take these tools for granted until they’re suddenly down or they’re not there,” Pasquarelli said.

What caused the Microsoft outage, and was it a cyberattack?

Microsoft has not shared a root cause. It says the outage was not the result of a cyberattack. On Friday, the company was rolling back a network change. It did not say whether that change was to blame.

“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” said Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, in a post on X late on Thursday.

Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft told him it did not suspect a cyberattack. “They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told a news conference in Sydney.

Goodwins said elevated load usually comes from one of two places. “Either there’s an external attack and some aggressor is trying to put lots and lots of artificial loads on the system to break it,” he said. “Microsoft says that hasn’t happened, and I believe them because there are ways to mitigate that.”

He said the other common cause is a faulty update to internal systems. “The update gets sent out over the administration network to all these servers, but there’s a mistake, and instead of it fixing things, it makes them reset or stop being able to talk to each other,” he said.

Pasquarelli said the evidence so far points to a technical failure. “It could literally be like a cable that basically damaged some of the infrastructure. It could be a sign of basically incompetence. It could be a mistake on some of their automated systems,” he said. “So far I do not see any evidence that points to an extremely high amount of computational power or traffic that is caused by AI systems.”

Goodwins said Microsoft’s focus on AI may have played an indirect role. “Microsoft has been completely focused on AI, and I imagine that the stuff like email and Teams, they’re just seen as forgotten revenue source. They won’t have got the investment and thought and management mind space they should have done,” he said.

“It does also show that for all Microsoft’s AI, it hasn’t got any AI that can help fix the networks,” he said.

Why are the repair attempts falling short?

Microsoft has posted a string of updates on X about its progress. Late on Thursday, it reported only limited recovery. Engineers were trying to route user traffic away from affected servers. The company later said the changes it applied were not working as expected.

“Some of these servers basically started failing some automated health checks, and then the traffic would go to some of the other servers, and they would then get overloaded,” Pasquarelli said.

“Think of it a bit like a highway where you have four lanes, and now all of a sudden you have two lanes. That means that there’s a lot more traffic, and because there’s traffic, then the entire thing shuts down,” he said.

Goodwins said servers that drop offline usually try to reconnect. They need to sync their files again. “As things come back up, they’re immediately swamped by the traffic from all the other servers desperate to talk to them. So it all falls down again,” he said.

“When the traffic accident’s cleared, there’s gridlock. There’s a huge backlog of traffic, and the roads can’t cope with it,” he said.

Goodwins also pointed to a staffing problem. Many experienced engineers have left Microsoft. “It’s not so much that there aren’t enough human eyes, but all the experienced people, the people who built the stuff up, have left,” he said. “There’s been a draining of corporate memory of how these systems are built up and how they work.”

When will Outlook, Teams and Copilot come back?

Microsoft has not given a timeline for full recovery. It says service may return gradually as capacity improves. Apps will reconnect over time rather than all at once.

“It’s fairly early on in the story. We don’t know all the facts,” Goodwins said. “It’s been going for a long time, and Microsoft’s been quite open in the fact the fixes aren’t really working yet.”

What can users do in the meantime?

Users can do little on their own. The problem sits with Microsoft’s servers, not personal devices. The desktop version of Outlook may still show emails people already downloaded. Teams chats and calls have mostly kept working.

Goodwins said the short term impact of such outages tends to be small. “You can’t log on to your email for a bit. Well, that happens all the time because your broadband’s down or your local computers stop working,” he said. “It comes back up and you grumble a bit and get back on with life.”

Pasquarelli said organisations should plan ahead for these disruptions. “What is the minimum viable service or the minimum viable product that we need to keep up if there’s a global outage?” he said.

How does it compare with earlier outages?

This is not Microsoft’s first major failure this year. In January, Microsoft 365 went down across North America for almost 10 hours. The company blamed heavy service load combined with reduced capacity during maintenance.

In late August, thousands of Outlook users worldwide were locked out of their mailboxes.

Other tech giants have faced similar breakdowns. In October 2025, an Amazon Web Services outage took down a large number of websites and apps.

In July 2024, a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed computers worldwide. It cancelled flights, disrupted hospitals and caused billions of dollars in losses.

What could the outage mean for Microsoft?

The Microsoft outage lands as Europe pushes for greater technological sovereignty. The continent wants to run its own servers and depend less on foreign providers. It has no tech giants of its own and leans heavily on US firms for digital services.

That push has gained speed during US President Donald Trump’s second term. He has imposed tariffs on Europe and threatened to take over Greenland, a Danish territory.

Earlier this year, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said government officials would stop using Zoom and other US owned video tools. They would switch to French software, partly to reduce “dependencies on non-European actors”.

“With the whole thing about digital sovereignty, meaning that you can’t trust that your data is secure if it’s being served by an American company because of changes to US legislation, certainly in Europe, there have been big pushes to find alternatives to Microsoft, and this sort of thing will only increase the pressure,” Goodwins said.

He added that Microsoft has relied on “intensive inertia”. “People feel they have to stick with Microsoft because the pain of transitioning somewhere else is too great. But at some point, that pain threshold changes,” he said.

Goodwins said he did not expect an immediate hit to Microsoft’s revenue. Customers are tied into licensing contracts. “I think in the long term it probably will, but in the short term, and it’s quarter-by-quarter business here, it won’t,” he said.

Pasquarelli said he could picture a short dip in Microsoft’s shares. Even so, he said its grip on office software would be hard to copy. “I don’t think that there’s any firm, at least not in Europe, that because of this outage could provide a credible and solid alternative,” he said. He added that organisations are more likely to “focus more on their digital resilience instead of building something of their own”.