Global Microsoft outage takes down Outlook and Teams for about 24 hours

In depth

A worldwide outage in Microsoft's cloud services disrupted the Outlook email service, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence tool, affecting users in 74 countries. At the peak, about 130,000 reports of Outlook problems were logged on the Downdetector site, and users reported error codes, frozen screens and difficulties sending emails and accessing calendars.

The outage continued through the night and also disrupted the work of businesses, hospitals, banks, courts and government ministries. The first repair attempts failed, and servers that were brought back online stopped responding again, and Microsoft said its repair efforts were not progressing as expected.

After more than 18 hours, the services began gradually returning to operation. Microsoft said the cause of the outage was technical and not cyber or artificial intelligence related, and attributed it to a capacity upgrade on its network. The company apologized and promised a detailed report.