From Asia to the US, a Microsoft outage involving services such as Outlook and Teams stretched for a second day on Friday, affecting users, businesses and government operations around the world. The outage affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with Exchange Online and email services. Users reported that services such as Outlook, Teams, and AI assistant Copilot were down. Microsoft said the outage was related to a technical issue, not malicious or cyber activity. In an update posted Friday morning, the company said it had resolved the underlying issue and was working to restore service to its customers. The Redmond, Washington-based company also said Friday that it was making “encouraging progress in the recovery,” and highlighted improvements in email delivery. However, users may still experience “intermittent access issues” or “delayed email delivery” as recovery efforts continue, Microsoft said. The company also reported “broader improvements” in North America and “sustained improvements in much of Europe,” as well as “encouraging signs of recovery” in the Asia-Pacific region. “We deeply regret the disruption this incident has caused to our customers and partners,” Microsoft said Friday on X. “We know the trust you place in our services and we take that responsibility extremely seriously.” While Microsoft appeared to be moving toward a resolution, the company said Friday afternoon that it did not yet have an “ETA for a full recovery.” The outage affected Microsoft’s suite of business products, as well as those designed for personal use by individuals, students and families. Users in more than 70 countries and territories experienced outages, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks technology outages. “Microsoft on Friday the 13th as a moment of global disruption [causes] It was a very bad day in Redmond,” Dan Ives, a technology analyst at Yorkville Ives and Co., said in an complete,” Lamanna said in the post. “We will be publishing the post-mortem shortly which will cover the step-by-step timeline and our numerous repair items to prevent similar outages in the future.” Widespread impact Microsoft first flagged technical issues just before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. Microsoft worked to restore its services. The outage disrupted email for hours, hampering work activity for some employees. “It’s just a challenge to send reports or things that needed to be approved,” one woman told CBS News Los Angeles. However, Some reveled in the slowdown, with social media users posting videos celebrating the freedom of not having access to email. It’s unclear how many people were affected. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to Microsoft’s OpenAI website, and Anthropic reported problems connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of the outages as more people use AI platforms to interact with other companies’ software. U.S.-based industrial Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a quarterly earnings conference call because of the outage. In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread outage to CrowdStrike’s outage in 2024. He spoke to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption. They believe they are dealing in some way (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that went wrong,” Burke told reporters in Sydney. Texas-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike blamed a bug in an update that allowed its systems to send incorrect data to millions of customer computers, triggering a global technology outage in July 2024 that grounded flights, stopped broadcasting television broadcasts and disrupted banks, hospitals and Hong Kong businessman Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum company, said his company’s Outlook accounts could not receive updates from its American customers due to the outage. If the situation continued further, it could “affect the production schedule,” he said. Air India said its flight operations were not affected by the Microsoft outage. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were not affected. The Singapore Government Technology Agency said the government’s email services were down and it is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue. operations, including email responses. Masanao Ozaki said the outage affected the government’s IT infrastructure and that officials were “closely monitoring developments.” More from CBS News Go deeper with The Free Press In:
