Microsoft global outage disrupts email, Teams, and AI tools
A cascading software issue knocked down core Microsoft services worldwide, affecting Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. The incident marks a significant disruption following a major outage in September.
Microsoft experienced a day-long global outage that began on Thursday, initially impacting services in the U.S. and the Americas before spreading worldwide. The cascading software issue rendered Outlook email, Teams video conferencing, and cloud services for consumer and business files unavailable. The disruption also extended to Copilot AI tools, Defender security screening, and Intune dashboards, with some users facing difficulties accessing cloud-based Windows computers. Microsoft stated that a large number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable and confirmed there was no evidence of malicious activity. Engineers struggled to recover the downed servers as the problems quickly spread around the globe. As of Friday morning on the U.S. East Coast, Outlook service had begun to recover. This incident follows a major outage in September that was attributed to a core authentication configuration issue.