Microsoft races to fix global outage hitting Outlook, Teams, and governments

Microsoft is struggling to restore services after a major outage affecting Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 offerings, impacting users, companies, and government operations worldwide. The company is working to identify the cause and restore functionality, with no indication of malicious activity. The outage, which began Thursday and continued into Friday, has affected over 430 million Microsoft 365 users, with roughly 130,000 reports of Outlook issues on Downdetector. Microsoft said recovery efforts are showing "early stabilization," but earlier fixes did not work as expected. Governments in Australia, Japan, Singapore, and the Philippines reported disruptions, and some businesses delayed operations. Microsoft compared the incident to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, suggesting a faulty update may be the cause. Airlines like Air India and IndiGo reported email disruptions but kept flights running, while AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic faced connectivity issues with Microsoft tools.