Microsoft races to resolve global outage as fix not working ‘as expected’

Microsoft is scrambling to find new ways to restore services after a global outage has left hundreds of thousands of users worldwide without access to emails and Teams as it admitted fixes were not going “as expected”.

The issue began late on Thursday afternoon and has seen users unable to access many of its most popular services, with thousands worldwide reporting they are unable to send and receive emails through Outlook.

Teams has also been affected for many, with the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also disrupted.

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday, with nearly 130,000 reporting Outlook issues at its peak.

Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.

The firm said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said.