A widespread outage affecting Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, spread to the Asia-Pacific region on Friday after disrupting services for thousands of users in the United States. The disruption lasted around 12 hours as the company struggled to fix a problem with its servers.
The outage affected government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. Email services at Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air were also disrupted.
This marks the second outage affecting Microsoft 365 services this year, raising questions about the reliability of the company’s services and the potential impact of repeated disruptions on the confidence of its corporate customers.
Microsoft said it had made adjustments to the affected servers, but the measures failed to restore services to stable normal operation, despite partial improvements in the regions where the changes were implemented.
In a statement posted on X, the company said it was reviewing additional measures to improve the stability of its infrastructure.
12 Hours of Disruption
Downdetector, a website that monitors online service outages based on user reports, recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at the height of the disruption, at around 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday.
The number of reports subsequently declined, but the outage continued for approximately 12 hours. The website recorded more than 18,000 reports of Outlook problems at 11:30 p.m. Eastern Time (04:30 GMT).
Problems also spread to several Microsoft services in India, Australia and Japan as the working day began on Friday in local time.
Microsoft explained that features of its 365 services relying on the Exchange Online platform and email were affected, while services and features that do not depend on the platform continued to operate.
Exchange Online provides cloud-based messaging services, including email, calendars, contacts and tasks.
The company said there was no indication that the outage had been caused by malicious online activity or a cyberattack.
Government Agencies and Companies Affected
Australian Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security Tony Burke said Microsoft did not believe the outage was caused by a cyberattack.
Burke explained that the company suspected a problem linked to a software update, in an incident that bore some similarities to the disruption caused by a CrowdStrike update in 2024.
He said the impact was largely concentrated on email systems, noting that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and the Australian Federal Police were among the affected agencies.
The 2024 CrowdStrike outage caused widespread disruption to hospital, banking and airport systems, highlighting the extent of the world’s reliance on interconnected technology infrastructure.
In the United States, the House of Representatives announced that its users had been affected by the outage, confirming that its engineers were working with Microsoft to resolve the problem.
Japan’s Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki also said the disruption was affecting the infrastructure of government information systems.
Meanwhile, US artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with their Microsoft connectivity services. Email support services at Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air were also affected.
Questions Over Service Reliability
Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely look beyond the immediate consequences of the outage. However, he warned that repeated disruptions could have a negative impact on Microsoft in the long term.
Microsoft has previously experienced outages affecting its Microsoft 365 services in January this year and October last year.
Last month, the company also reported a disruption to its Azure cloud platform, which affected its productivity software suite and several sectors around the world.
