Global Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 for hours

In brief

• A worldwide Microsoft outage since Thursday evening has disrupted Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 and the Copilot AI assistant.
• Users in Europe, the Americas and Asia were affected, including the Czech Ministry of Finance, whose email was down.
• Microsoft says its fixes are not working as planned and that it was not a cyberattack.

Outage hits users across three continents

Microsoft is dealing with a large, worldwide disruption to several of its services. Problems began on Thursday evening and affected the Outlook email service, the Teams communication platform, the Microsoft 365 suite and linked artificial intelligence tools, including the Copilot assistant (Masívny celosvetový výpadok služieb Microsoftu: Podľa firmy nejdú opravy podľa plánov – STVR) (Výpadky Microsoftu zasiahli celý svet. Firma priznáva, že riešenie problémov nejde podľa plánu – HNonline.sk). Reports came from Europe, the Americas and Asia, and monitoring site Downdetector recorded complaints from users in the Czech Republic as well (Microsoft postihl rozsáhlý výpadek. Nefunguje Outlook, Teams ani další služby – Deník.cz).

Government offices affected

The impact reached public bodies too. The Czech Ministry of Finance said that email communication with the ministry had stopped because of the global Microsoft failure, and it expected the problem to be resolved during Friday morning. Firms and state offices in several countries reported similar disruptions.

Company says fixes are slow

Microsoft said its efforts to remove the outage were not moving as expected but that it was still working on the problem (Pošta Outlook a další. Uživatelé služeb Microsoftu se od čtvrtečního večera potýkají s výpadky – iROZHLAS). Shortly after 7:00 CET on Friday it wrote on X that it was rolling out further measures to optimise traffic and improve stability. Earlier, it had reported only a partial improvement that did not amount to a lasting fix. According to the BBC, a senior Microsoft executive said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack.

Recovery still pending

At the time of reporting, restoration of full service had not been confirmed, and Microsoft had not given a firm timetable for complete recovery. Users and organisations that rely on the affected tools were advised to expect continued delays until the company announces that its services are stable.

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