Microsoft Teams Down? Global Outage Drags Into Second Day as Millions Lose Outlook, Chats and Meetings

A global Microsoft outage that disrupted Teams, Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services stretched into a second day Friday. Businesses, governments, courts and schools in dozens of countries were left struggling to communicate. Microsoft said it was making progress but did not give a timeline for full recovery.

The disruption began Thursday afternoon U.S. Eastern time and spread quickly around the world. Outage tracker Downdetector said reports reached 74 countries and territories within about an hour. Microsoft has said there is no evidence of a cyberattack.

In its latest update, about 7 a.m. ET Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing "encouraging recovery progress in Europe, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure."

Earlier Friday, the company said it was "seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue."

Teams largely back, but problems linger

Teams, the chat, video meeting and file-sharing platform used by hundreds of millions of people inside Microsoft 365, was among the first services to falter Thursday. Users reported dropped meetings, chats that wouldn't load and failed sign-ins.

Microsoft said Thursday that "mitigative actions have successfully restored service health and functionality" for Teams after an earlier problem. By about 2 a.m. UTC Friday, the company had traced most of the remaining trouble to Exchange Online, the email system behind Outlook. Teams meetings and chats had largely returned to service.

Problems persisted, however. Microsoft reported that creating live and virtual events in Teams was failing. Links in Teams and Outlook that had been rewritten by its Safe Links security feature were not opening. Many Teams features also rely on Exchange for calendars, meeting invitations and mailbox data, so users kept running into errors while email remained degraded.

Outage-tracking sites were still logging hundreds of Teams complaints Friday morning, many describing connection problems.

Microsoft's consumer services were also hit. A notice on its website said: "This issue impacts Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web."

Outlook hit hardest

Outlook bore the brunt. Many users could not reach their mailboxes on the web, the desktop app or mobile, and many emails were delayed.

In the United States, about 130,000 users reported Outlook problems shortly after 1 p.m. ET Thursday, according to Downdetector. Reports fell to about 37,000 by 6 p.m. ET. By about 7 a.m. GMT Friday, Downdetector had recorded at least 43,000 Outlook problem reports from 72 countries.

At the peak, Downdetector logged 19,650 reports per minute across Outlook, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, Copilot and Teams. On a typical Thursday the figure is fewer than 15.

Microsoft has not said how many users were affected.

Not a cyberattack, Microsoft says

Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, addressed the outage in a post on X.

"We regret that today's outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue," Lamanna wrote. "There is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."

He added: "We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it."

Microsoft has not published a root cause. The company said elevated load across several regions was likely contributing to connectivity errors. It later said several servers had become unexpectedly unavailable and that the load was not caused by more user traffic.

The problems worsened as servers failed health checks and traffic was shifted onto other machines, which then became overloaded. Servers that came back online were swamped by reconnection traffic and failed again. Microsoft said some of the spike in traffic came from its own efforts to redistribute it.

Engineers tried several fixes, including limiting traffic to affected servers, rolling some back to an earlier software configuration and rebooting infrastructure. Microsoft said on its service health page that the recovery work "includes reviewing server performance and confirming that developed patches have been applied."

Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told reporters in Sydney that Microsoft had told him it did not believe it was dealing with a cyberattack. He compared the incident to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, describing it as "an update that has gone awry."

"We've made additional progress toward recovery, with actions now completed across portions of affected infrastructure and traffic being gradually restored," Microsoft said in a separate social media update.

Governments, banks and courts disrupted

The outage hit organisations around the world.

In Japan, government ministries went back to paper after being unable to send email through most of Friday's workday. Government systems in Singapore were also disrupted. The Supreme Court of the Philippines warned of delays.

In Australia, the country's spy agency and the federal police were among those affected. Courts and schools opened Friday to unusable inboxes.

In Hong Kong, staff at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were locked out of email and Teams. Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa lost email support channels. Electric vehicle maker Workhorse postponed its earnings call.

In the United States, city governments including Miami Beach, Florida, and Austin, Texas, told residents to phone instead of using email. A Colorado sheriff's office said the outage delayed bond payments for prisoners.

The disruption also reached third-party artificial intelligence services. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude reported problems with their Microsoft 365 connectors. Microsoft's own Copilot assistant was also disrupted, and Microsoft employees were reportedly unable to send email during the downtime.

Scam warnings

Banks including Standard Chartered and ING Australia warned customers about scammers posing as tech support during the outage. They noted that email security systems that would normally catch such messages were also affected.

Users are advised to ignore unsolicited calls or messages offering to "fix" Microsoft accounts and to check service status only through official Microsoft channels.

A string of outages

The incident is the latest in a series of Microsoft 365 disruptions this year. In January, the service was down across North America for almost 10 hours, which Microsoft blamed on heavy load combined with reduced capacity during maintenance. In late August, thousands of Outlook users worldwide were locked out of their mailboxes.

Mark Gregory, an associate professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, said organisations should thoroughly test updates before rolling them out to live networks. He also suggested businesses keep backup communication options for outages.

The outage came as European Union leaders met in Dublin to discuss reducing reliance on foreign technology providers. Analysts said the disruption could add pressure on organisations to diversify away from Microsoft, though they did not expect an immediate hit to the company's revenue because of long-term licensing contracts.

What users can do

Microsoft said users may see services come back gradually as capacity is restored and apps reconnect. Desktop versions of Outlook may still show emails that were downloaded before the outage.

IT administrators can follow updates through the Microsoft 365 admin centre's service health dashboard. Individual users can check Microsoft's official status pages and social media accounts.

Microsoft has not said when full service will return.