Microsoft is facing challenges restoring its Outlook email services following a major global outage that also disrupted other products, including Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, leaving businesses and government institutions struggling to communicate.
The technology company said on Thursday that its initial attempts to fix the problem had not produced the expected results, forcing it to explore alternative solutions to restore normal operations. The disruption, which Microsoft blamed on unusually high demand across its infrastructure, affected users in different parts of the world, with reports emerging from the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said in a statement posted on X.
The company added that it was exploring other ways to address the problem and increase its system capacity but did not provide a definite timeline for the full restoration of services. They are identifying alternate work streams that can be applied to increase capacity,” Microsoft added.
According to outage monitoring platform Downdetector, the disruption spread to 74 countries and territories within an hour, affecting individuals, businesses and public institutions that depend on Microsoft’s services for daily operations.
Among the affected institutions was New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which informed users that the outage had disrupted its ability to receive emails. The ministry said the problem also affected New Zealand’s embassies, consulates and representative offices worldwide.
Microsoft initially reported that it was investigating complaints from users in the Americas before confirming that the disruption extended across multiple regions. The company later established that part of its infrastructure was experiencing unusually high demand in several regions, resulting in connectivity problems for Microsoft 365 users.
Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription platform, which provides access to widely used workplace applications, including Outlook and Teams. They are aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact and continued working to resolve the disruption. Downdetector recorded a sharp drop in outage reports around 4:50 am GMT from users in cities such as Washington and Hong Kong. However, thousands of users continued reporting difficulties accessing Teams and Copilot.
In a subsequent update posted shortly after 6 pm Eastern Time (11 pm GMT), Microsoft reported limited improvements as engineers worked to redirect internet traffic away from affected servers. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect.
Despite the reported improvements, Microsoft had not confirmed when all affected services would return to normal, leaving users waiting for a complete resolution.