Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook and Teams for thousands across 74 countries, including Singapore

Microsoft suffered a major global outage Thursday, disrupting Outlook, Teams, and Copilot for tens of thousands of users across 74 countries, including Singapore, with Microsoft attributing the issue to "elevated load" on its infrastructure. The disruption lasted for much of the US workday, with Outlook problem reports peaking at 138,058 around 1pm ET before falling to roughly 37,000 by evening. Microsoft said it was "aggressively" working to reduce impact by pausing deployments, rerouting traffic, and restarting affected servers, observing only limited recovery by 6pm ET. The outage forced electric truck maker Workhorse Group to reschedule its quarterly results, and followed a similar Azure cloud platform disruption last month. OpenAI and Anthropic also reported issues with Microsoft connectors during the incident.