Microsoft says efforts to fix global outage ‘not going as expected’ with millions

Microsoft is battling to fix the widespread outage that has knocked out various platforms, including Outlook, for millions worldwide with the company acknowledging that efforts to restore services were ‘not taking as expected.’

Millions of users around the world began reporting that Outlook was down shortly after 6pm GMT on Thursday, in what experts have dubbed the ‘most disruptive email-related business outage of all time’.

More than 17 hours later, users are still unable to open their inboxes, send emails and access other Microsoft services.

Governments, police forces and numerous companies around the world have reported problems with their services, but no definitive cause has been given. 

More than 430 million people use Microsoft’s suite of subscription service apps, though the company has not confirmed exactly how many users are affected by the outage. 

Users have also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app, Teams, its artificial intelligence assistant, Copilot, as well as other Microsoft 365 services, in at least 74 countries.

Microsoft said on Thursday night that it was attempting to identify ‘alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances’ in order to address the outage.

Earlier, the company said that infrastructure experiencing an ‘elevated load across multiple regions’ was likely contributing to the connectivity errors. 

Microsoft executive vice president, Charles Lamanna, said: ‘For now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.’

As Europe awoke to further disruption this morning, in the UK services including the NHS, police forces and rail companies are all affected. 

Shortly after 12pm, Microsoft said it was seeing ‘encouraging’ progress in Europe as users began to be able to access services again, while availability in North America was ‘also improving’. 

Microsoft said earlier on Thursday that infrastructure experiencing an ‘elevated load across multiple regions’ was likely contributing to the massive outage

Millions worldwide have been unable to open and use Microsoft Outlook, as well as other Microsoft services, for most of the day

The outage has affected airlines, judicial systems and even national spy agencies around the world.

At around 9.30am, the firm said it was seeing ‘early stabilization and capacity improvements’ as a result of its recovery efforts, and said it had extended email timeout – the length of time until an email is classed as undeliverable – to 48 hours.

Later on Friday morning, Microsoft said it was seeing ‘incremental improvement in several workloads’, before adding it was making ‘additional progress towards service recovery’ and had ‘completed’ fixes in the Asia-Pacific region. 

It comes after a similar, smaller scale outage in 2023 which Microsoft blamed on a ‘networking configuration issue’. 

In an update on Friday morning, Microsoft said it has seen ‘marginal success’ as it attempts to fix the outage. 

After applying a patch to Microsoft 365, it said it is seeing ‘positive results’ and promised to reveal the cause of the outage once the problems are fixed. 

‘We’re seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure,’ Microsoft said.

The company added that it is continuing to work urgently to fix the issue affecting its services.

‘We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online.

‘As of now (7am GMT), we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution.

‘Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defence-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report.’

A map of the world showing how when the Microsoft outage began and when its services were first affected

Pressure continues to mount on Microsoft to restore its services as Europe wakes up for the working day. 

Users insisted that was not the case as they continued reporting the outage which landed in the middle of the workday for many.

In the UK, businesses and police forces have reported widespread outages, with disruption also expected to NHS services – although trusts have told patients to attend scheduled appointments as normal.

Union GMB has said that the outage is stopping 111 and 999 from referring patient details as they usually would.

The issue is creating a ‘massive backlog’ though emergency callouts ‘appear to be unaffected’.

Rachel Harrison, GMB national secretary, said: ‘The Microsoft data outage is having a serious impact across ambulance and NHS trusts.

‘Those who work in 111 and 999 services are unable to refer patient details in the normal way which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos.

‘Luckily emergency and life threatening call outs appear to be unaffected.’

The UK National Pharmacy Association said the outage will mean waits for prescriptions will be longer, as pharmacies cannot communicate with GP practices or patients by email.

Some GP surgeries are unable to access their online consultation system, Rapid Health, and C-section appointments have been cancelled due to diary issues.

And NHS GP Dr Tim Frank, who works in Penzance, Cornwall, told the Today programme he had been unable to receive any emails, with Microsoft ‘central’ to NHS services.

A chart displaying the level of Outlook issue reports having soared to more than 2,000 times the norm

‘This is going to be very disruptive today and Fridays are always a heavily laden day due to the upcoming weekend,’ he added.

The NHS is understood to be implementing back-up plans including using paper records to get around the outage. 

Hertfordshire Police said its online form submissions ‘may be affected’ and urged anyone with ‘time-critical’ but non-emergency reports to phone 101.

Many other forces, including Dorset Police, the Met Police and Greater Manchester Police, have also asked the public to phone 101 or 999 in urgent cases. 

It’s understood that UK intelligence operations are unaffected, but some court cases are. Jurors in a trial at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court were sent home early after they were told the Microsoft global outage had caused ‘all sorts of delays’.  

Judge Maurice Greene told them: ‘What we are learning is the dangers of our reliability on computer systems and platforms, and so on.

‘Many institutions rely on Microsoft 365 as do the court and various institutions connected to the court, so there have all been sort of delays because of this.

‘I would say sorry but it’s not my fault. It may be Mr Gates’s fault but I don’t think he is going to come and apologise.’

The UK Government said it had ‘robust contingency plans’ in place across Whitehall to minimise disruption caused to services after the global Microsoft outage. 

A Government spokesman said: ‘We are aware of the ongoing global technical issues affecting Microsoft services.

‘We are working closely with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, with robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption.’

The Welsh government has also said it is putting contingency plans in place. 

Meanwhile UK Defence Minister Luke Pollard said this morning that systems need to be ‘more resilient’, adding it is ‘deeply frustrating when your tech doesn’t work’.

‘Microsoft are onto the problem, they’re making steps for it and I hope that they can resolve it very soon,’ he continued.

‘But I’m afraid that in an environment where we’re so dependent on technology, we do need to make sure that these systems are more resilient and where there are problems, that they can recover faster.

‘I imagine that is the conversation that many of my government cyber colleagues are having with Microsoft at this moment.’

Rail company LNER in Britain has warned customers they may face issues retrieving tickets on email, while DHL has said it cannot guarantee email delivery.

National Rail, which provides information about Britain’s train network, said people who bought train e-tickets after the outage began were likely to have been affected.

It said customers who are unable to locate or access their tickets through their email may still be able to access them on the website or app from where they bought their tickets, and by logging into their account.

Schools have also been left unable to access emails, as have councils including West Northamptonshire Council, which says it is still contactable by phone.

The University of Cambridge said on Friday the outage had impacted email, calendars and SharePoint, warning that access could be ‘unstable and intermittent’. It advised those affected to communicate using Teams if possible, or switch to ‘mobile messaging’. 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pictured at the Golden Age of American Innovation Summit on October 8

Experts have warned the outage is likely the ‘most disruptive’ ever seen.

Gergely Orosz, author of The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter and a former leading software engineer at several major tech companies including Skype and Uber, told the BBC the level of disruption is ‘very unusual’.

‘That mitigation is taking 12 plus hours for a global outage for a service with 100 million plus users – this is very rare,’ he said.

‘This could well be the most disruptive email-related business outage of all time.’ 

Elsewhere, Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has said Microsoft had told him the company ​did not believe the outage had been caused by a cyber attack, according to Reuters. 

China has also been affected by the Microsoft outage with many international firms in the country relying on Outlook or Teams as communication channels.

OpenAI said on Thursday afternoon that it was ‘investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.

‘We’ll share an update when we know more.’

The company noted that ChatGPT had suffered a ‘degraded performance.’ 

Another AI giant, Anthropic, reported that users were experiencing issues caused by a Microsoft 365 service incident, and that problems continue with its model Claude.

Anthropic said that mail, calendar and search tool functions in its Microsoft 365 connector were failing for most requests.

The outage even affected jails around the US, with the Arapahoe Sheriff’s Office in Colorado posting Thursday evening on X that officials were unable to receive email notifications needed to process online bond payments. 

As a result, anyone needing to post bond for immediate release was asked to do so in person at the jail.

The US House of Representatives said the outage impacted its users and its engineers were working with Microsoft.

The New York City Department of Investigation noted that evictions scheduled for Friday were suspended as a result of the outage.

Elsewhere, India’s biggest airline IndiGo said it is not receiving emails and has urged travellers to use other available support channels. 

The Philippines Supreme Court is currently experiencing similar issues and said: ‘responses to emails and other transactions may be delayed’.

In Australia, the nation’s spy and police agencies have also been hit by the Microsoft issues but officials said the impact is not severe.

‘The impact that they are dealing with is very much on email system’, head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, Mike Burgess, told reporters. 

 At its peak, reported problems with Outlook reached 140,000 complaints by 6pm yesterday, more than 2,000 times the average, according to monitoring website Downdetector.

By 7am on Friday, the email platform received 43,000 issue reports across 72 countries in a single hour.

Microsoft said a number of servers had become ‘unexpectedly unavailable’ because of a problem that caused them to fail during ‘automated health checks.’ 

It is not immediately clear why the failure happened.

The company later said it was testing a fix and rolling out an alternative method to bring the impacted servers back online.

‘We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,’ Microsoft’s 365 Status account wrote on X.

Overnight Microsoft posted that ‘mitigative actions’ had ‘successfully restored service health and functionality’ in North America.

Microsoft touted that more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies use Copilot, its AI assistant which has been struck down by the outage.  

This is the second disruption to Microsoft’s 365 services this year, raising concerns that repeated failures could push corporate clients to question Microsoft’s reliability.

Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and also in October last year.

Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely look past the outage but that repeated disruptions could hurt Microsoft over time.

‘I think investors will take this in their stride for now, because very few of these customers can realistically walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight,’ Mr Gilbert said.

‘The bigger worry is that this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands.

‘The market will want to see Microsoft prove it can keep the lights on before it asks customers to spend more on Copilot.’

The current outage happened on the same week that Microsoft released a security fix to address an unrelated vulnerability in which hackers could gain access to sign-in information.

That would allow them to impersonate victims and potentially access accounts or workplace systems. 

Microsoft released a fix for that vulnerability on November 10 as part of its security updates. However, affected computers remain vulnerable until the relevant patch is installed.

Users should open an Office application, such as Word, select File, then Account, and choose Update Options followed by Update Now. 

In classic Outlook, the account menu may instead be called Office Account. 

The vulnerability has already been used in real attacks.

Until that update is installed, users should avoid opening unexpected attachments or message files, even if they seem to come from known senders.