Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft 365 worldwide

Microsoft's Outlook email service is experiencing a major global outage on Friday, preventing users from accessing inboxes and sending or receiving emails, with disruptions also affecting Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 services. The outage, which began on Thursday, stems from a server-side infrastructure problem involving Microsoft's Exchange Online platform, where a core process became overwhelmed, causing servers to fail and triggering a cascading failure. Microsoft has confirmed no malicious activity or cyberattack is behind the incident, and reports from Downdetector indicate users affected across more than 70 countries, with US reports peaking around 138,000. Microsoft's initial recovery attempts, including restarting servers and redistributing traffic, have not fully succeeded, as some restored servers became unresponsive again. The company has applied a patch to a portion of its infrastructure with positive results and is monitoring before expanding, but has not announced a definitive timeline for full restoration.