A major global Microsoft outage has entered its second day, leaving tens of thousands of users without access to essential workplace tools including Outlook, Teams, and the Copilot AI assistant. Microsoft announced that its mitigation efforts are not progressing as initially anticipated, though the company confirmed the disruption is not the result of a cyber-security breach.
Global Disruptions and Infrastructure Strain
The connectivity problems have persisted for more than 10 hours, impacting businesses, airlines, courts, and government agencies across dozens of countries and territories. Monitoring website Downdetector indicated that global complaints regarding Outlook peaked at roughly 140,000 on Thursday before dipping to 28,000 overnight. Microsoft attributed the ongoing service failures to an "elevated load" on its infrastructure after a high volume of servers unexpectedly became unavailable, redirecting excess traffic and straining remaining systems.
As recovery efforts continue, Microsoft reported observing "marginal success" and partial recovery in regions where patches have been applied and server infrastructures rebooted. However, the tech giant noted that some remediation actions have not yielded a sustained recovery yet, keeping organizations worldwide on high alert.
