Microsoft Global Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams and Government Services

A global outage affecting Microsoft 365 services has disrupted Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot AI assistant, impacting government agencies, healthcare providers, and businesses worldwide.

Microsoft is working to restore services by using a “measured approach” to identify and repair affected infrastructure. The company stated that it has seen “incremental improvement in several workloads” and “early stabilization,” although service health remains variable and capacity has not yet returned to baseline levels.

Widespread Impact on Government and Public Services

The disruption has hit critical public sectors across several continents. In the United Kingdom, British police forces reported being unable to receive online crime reports, and the National Health Service (NHS) warned of potential delays in prescription processing. The British government is currently working with Microsoft to assess the impact on public services.

In Asia, Singapore’s Government Technology Agency reported that government emails were down, while the Philippines’ Supreme Court noted that the outage has affected some of its operations. Japanese authorities also reported impacts to the country’s government IT infrastructure.

No Evidence of Cyberattack

Microsoft has indicated that there is no evidence to suggest the outage was caused by malicious activity. Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke noted that Microsoft has likened the disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, which was caused by a faulty software update rather than a cyberattack.

The ripple effects of the outage have extended to the artificial intelligence sector, with OpenAI and Anthropic reporting difficulties connecting to Microsoft 365 tools. In the aviation industry, Indian carriers Air India and IndiGo reported disruptions to their email support services, although flight operations remained unaffected.

Microsoft engineers continue to address the issue, treating the recovery efforts with urgency until full service resolution is achieved.