Microsoft has been hit by a major global outage, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.
The disruption, which began on Thursday and is continuing this morning, is affecting users across 74 countries and territories, with around 130,000 reports of problems in the US alone at its peak.
Microsoft blamed “elevated load” on its infrastructure and said it was working “aggressively” to restore services, including redirecting traffic and restarting affected servers.
The company reported “partial recovery” overnight, but services were still experiencing disruption at 5am on Friday.
Charles Lamanna, the executive vice-president of platforms at Microsoft, said there was no evidence that the outage was caused by a cybersecurity breach, with “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”.
The outage also affected Microsoft integrations used by AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic, adding to concerns about the resilience of major cloud services following a separate Microsoft Azure outage last month.