Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Outlook and Teams globally

A global outage of Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, is disrupting businesses and government agencies worldwide, with experts expecting problems to persist into the weekend. Microsoft has ruled out a cyberattack as the cause. The disruption, which began in the US and spread to the Asia-Pacific region, peaked with over 130,000 reported outages on Downdetector. Microsoft engineers identified an overloaded process on affected servers and have reverted a recent configuration change that coincided with the start of the issue, though recovery attempts have been partially unsuccessful. The outage has impacted sensitive government areas, including Australia's intelligence agency and federal police, and has affected AI services from OpenAI and Anthropic. IT experts attribute the cause to an internal network change that caused servers to incorrectly report as failed, and Microsoft has extended email timeout durations to 48 hours, suggesting a prolonged recovery period.