Global Microsoft outage knocks out Outlook and other services

Millions of people around the world have been cut off from their Outlook email since Thursday evening by a global Microsoft outage that has disrupted businesses, governments, public services and the media for more than half a day.

Other services, including Teams and Copilot, have also been hit as the tech giant struggles to fix the server problems it has blamed for the disruption. Microsoft has ruled out any “malicious” activity.

On Friday, the company said it had made “additional progress” towards restoring services, with traffic gradually returning across parts of its affected infrastructure.

“We're seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue,” it said in a post on social media.

Public services in limbo

Rail operators in Germany, Canada and the UK have issued advice to passengers unable to retrieve train tickets booked for Friday.

They warned that tickets sent by email might be temporarily inaccessible, but said passengers should still be able to retrieve them through the website or app they used to buy them.

In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) has also been affected. Staff handling emergency calls “are unable to refer patient details in the normal way, which is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos”, Rachel Harrison, head of public services at the GMB union, said in a statement.

The European stock market operator Euronext advised listed companies to use the telephone to communicate corporate information.

In France, local authorities have also been affected. The town hall of Aulnay-sous-Bois, in the north-eastern suburbs of Paris, reported that its email system was down.

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“All the city's services are currently without email due to a global outage affecting Microsoft services,” the municipality said in a statement. “No emails can be sent or received.”

It said municipal services could still be reached by telephone and that public facilities were open as usual.

Users in Asia and Africa have also been affected.

In the United States, OpenAI and Anthropic both reported problems connecting to Microsoft 365 tools. This shows how outages now spread further as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to work with other companies' software.

'Fragility of our interconnected world'
The outage “highlights the fragility of our interconnected world”, Christophe Aulnette, a former president of Microsoft France, told the French broadcaster franceinfo.

“An interconnected world creates points of vulnerability in central locations that can affect the entire planet,” he said. He pointed to a recent incident in mid-October, when cyberattacks targeted connected refrigeration systems in French supermarkets.

Aulnette said he had “no information” about a possible cyberattack on Outlook. But he said the outage “potentially shows that, with artificial intelligence, new sophisticated attacks can be developed”.

 (with newswires)