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A massive global outage of Microsoft systems has disrupted—and in some cases completely shut down—a range of services, including email and artificial intelligence products.
According to outage tracking site Downdetector, reports of problems with the Outlook email service peaked on Thursday evening at 18:00 GMT, with about 140,000 complaints recorded worldwide.
Microsoft said that the cause of the failure was not a cybersecurity incident, but attempts to fix the problem have not yet brought significant results.
Here's what we know so far about which services were affected and what exactly went wrong.
What doesn't work?
"Connection issues" affected Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft's artificial intelligence software Copilot.
Users complained that they were unable to send or receive emails or view certain files or data in their calendar apps.
However, some users can still fully work in Teams, exchange messages and conduct online meetings as usual.
How many users are affected?
The exact extent of the outage has not yet been confirmed, but according to Downdetector, about 140,000 people from 74 countries were complaining about the problems on Thursday evening. The next morning (around 07:00 GMT) there were 43,000 reports of problems with Microsoft Outlook.
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According to the Microsoft website, more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 software.
This software is used by companies around the world, so it is expected that the failure may affect other services.
Technology companies OpenAI and Anthropic also reported problems caused by the glitch.
OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, said that it is studying problems affecting the connection to Microsoft services - because of them, some tools do not work correctly.
Government departments also faced difficulties, in particular the Singapore government and the Australian intelligence service. In Japan, disruptions affected government agencies and many large companies. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki warned that the government's overall IT infrastructure, which uses Microsoft solutions, was facing disruption. Local media reported that some banks and financial institutions were forced to use faxes to confirm transactions.
UK clinics and GP surgeries have warned of the potential difficulties, with some asking patients to contact urgent matters by telephone rather than via email or web forms. British police also urged people to call rather than use the online form.
Swiss group Richemont, owner of the Cartier and Chloé brands, was forced to postpone the publication of its half-year financial results on Friday, and US electric truck maker Workhorse Group postponed its quarterly earnings scheduled for Thursday, the Financial Times writes.
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What went wrong?
Microsoft ruled out the possibility of a cyber attack and explained the failure as an “increased load” on the infrastructure.
This term means that servers are operating under significantly higher load than normal.
According to the company, during the outage a large number of servers “unexpectedly became unavailable,” causing an increase in requests to the remaining servers, leading to their overload.
In the latest update, the company said that there were "first signs" of stabilization of the systems, but their condition is not yet stable enough. Service throughput "has not yet returned to normal levels."
“As part of these measures, we are increasing the waiting time for email delivery (timeout window) to 48 hours. This will allow messages delayed due to the outage to be preserved while services continue to be restored,” the message says.
The "email timeout window" in this context refers to the period during which an email client - for example, Outlook - will wait to receive an incoming letter.
Microsoft is taking this step to avoid a situation in which emails sent from other systems (such as Gmail or other services not affected by the outage) could be lost if they arrived on the system at a time when it has not yet been fully restored.
Previously, the corporation stated that attempts to correct the situation “did not produce the expected result.”
What do the experts say?
Australian cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt told the BBC that the glitch could have far-reaching consequences.
“Microsoft is a critical part of the Internet's infrastructure. This incident reminds us how critical email remains. The failure not only prevents people from working, but also prevents them from performing other tasks: arranging meetings, making purchases that require verification, creating accounts or accessing them,” he noted.
Paul Spain, from New Zealand consultancy Gorilla Technology, added that the unavailability of email and other services meant companies had effectively "lost a day of work", which was "frustrating" for users.
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