Microsoft Says No Malicious Activity Behind Global Outage

Microsoft said Thursday it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the hours-long disruption of its Outlook services, attributing the issue to elevated load on its infrastructure. The company is treating the incident with urgency until full resolution. The outage affected Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot, impacting users in 74 countries and territories. Microsoft acknowledged repair efforts were not working as expected and was identifying alternate workstreams to increase capacity, with users reporting issues globally. Downdetector showed a sharp decline in disruption reports in Washington and Hong Kong around 0450 GMT, indicating limited recovery. New Zealand's foreign ministry confirmed email disruptions affected its embassies worldwide, while Microsoft noted users may experience gradual recovery as capacity is restored.