WASHINGTON – A widespread outage affecting Microsoft services caused disruptions worldwide on Thursday, as several of the company’s products, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, went offline, affecting government institutions, businesses, and critical sectors across multiple countries.
The company said its latest attempts to restore services had not yielded the expected results, noting that it was continuing to review changes made to improve system stability after they failed to deliver the anticipated improvements.
Microsoft said it was reviewing affected data traffic and infrastructure to identify opportunities to improve data routing and restore service stability.
The company confirmed that it would continue sharing updates on the outage, stressing that “there are no indications that what happened was the result of malicious activity,” effectively ruling out evidence of a cyberattack at this stage.
According to Downdetector, a website that monitors service outages, reports of the disruption came from 74 countries and territories within approximately one hour. Reports concerning Outlook alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their usual levels.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he had been briefed on the outage, noting that Microsoft did not believe it was dealing with a cyber incident at this stage, but rather a problem potentially similar to the previous disruption caused by an erroneous update from CrowdStrike.
In New Zealand, government institutions and businesses were affected by the outage and were forced to resort to manual work procedures, while Immigration New Zealand temporarily suspended the processing of all visa applications.
In Canada, Unity Health Toronto declared a “Code Grey,” used when infrastructure systems are disrupted or lost, after its email system went down. The institution confirmed that patient care had not been affected and that its hospitals remained safe and open to providing care.
The outage comes amid widespread reliance on Microsoft services among institutions and businesses worldwide, highlighting the impact of technical disruptions on operations and essential services.
