Global Outlook outage persists, Microsoft rules out cyberattack

Microsoft ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of a global Outlook outage on Friday, reporting early signs of recovery while the disruption continued. The company said it saw positive results in server stability after applying a fix, though no restoration timeline was given. The outage, which began Thursday, stemmed from high load on infrastructure and affected Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot AI assistant. Microsoft stated it had no knowledge of malicious activity and promised a full investigation once resolved, while acknowledging earlier fix attempts had failed. Downdetector tracked the outage across 74 countries, including New Zealand, which reported email impacts at embassies worldwide. Japan's economy minister warned of significant effects, and Microsoft noted limited service recovery by Thursday evening as it redirected traffic from affected servers.