Microsoft restores Outlook, Teams, and Copilot after nine-hour outage

Microsoft is struggling to restore access to Outlook, Teams, and Copilot more than nine hours after a major outage began, disrupting email and chat services for many users during the US workday on Thursday. The disruption, which drew about 200,000 user reports on Downdetector, is among Microsoft's most severe, with previous outages rarely lasting more than several hours. The company said a core process on affected servers became overwhelmed, and while it is seeing positive results from restarting infrastructure, services have not been fully restored. The outage also impacted other products like cybersecurity software and file-sharing tools, prompting Workhorse Group to postpone its earnings release and causing disruptions to Japan's shared government IT platform. Microsoft shares fell 0.4% in extended trading.