A Microsoft outage is affecting services including Teams, Outlook and AI software Copilot.
Microsoft has said the problem was caused by a higher-than-usual stress on its servers but that systems were now showing "early signs of stabilisation" as work continued on a fix.
The BBC's technology reporter Shiona McCallum explains what we know.
SINGAPORE, Nov 13 – Microsoft says it is racing to resolve a global disruption affecting its apps and services. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna ruled out a cybersecurity incident, saying the global outage was not caused by malicious activity or hacking.
Microsoft says servers unexpectedly went offline, disrupting Outlook email, Teams, Copilot and other services.
Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to repair a major outage of Outlook were not going as expected and the firm was seeking alternative solutions as users around the world were left without its crucial services. A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Outlook and Teams failures impact government agencies, schools and businesses. Microsoft says some servers are returning to service and streamlined recovery process under way to end a global outage Microsoft begins restoring services amid global outage affecting Outlook and Teams Home affairs minister says Microsoft ‘do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event’ Australia’s federal police and security services were affected by the Microsoft outage, the heads of those agencies have confirmed.
An alert on Microsoft’s site said it was ‘aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact’ and blamed a server issue Microsoft says it is “aggressively pursuing all pathways” after users reported issues accessing its 365 suite of programs, including Outlook and Teams. Outage website Down Detector showed a spike in Microsoft 365 problems, with nearly 130,000 reports of issues affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive.
Outlook, Teams and Copilot remain disrupted in 74 countries as Microsoft reports ‘marginal success’ in fixing outage.