Thousands of users experienced disruptions after Microsoft suffered a major outage affecting several popular services.
The problems affected Outlook, Microsoft Teams and Copilot, disrupting businesses across the United States and Asia-Pacific.
Government departments in Australia, Japan and the US also reported difficulties accessing Microsoft services.
Furthermore, companies including OpenAI and Anthropic experienced problems with their Microsoft connections.
The incident marks another significant disruption for Microsoft’s productivity platform this year.
According to Microsoft, engineers introduced changes to affected servers while investigating the underlying problems.
However, those adjustments failed to restore services consistently across affected regions.
Some locations experienced partial improvements, but widespread disruptions continued.
“We’re reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability,” the company said on X.
Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 Outlook outage reports in the US during Thursday’s peak.
The platform continued receiving thousands of complaints approximately 12 hours after the disruption began.
Governments and businesses struggle with email disruption
Microsoft confirmed that services relying on Exchange Online experienced significant difficulties.
The platform supports essential functions, including email, calendars, contacts and task management.
Meanwhile, Microsoft said services operating independently of Exchange Online remained available.
The company also stated that it was “not aware” of any malicious activity behind the incident.
Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft suspected a technical problem.
“They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said.
He added that email systems were experiencing the greatest disruption.
Airlines and financial companies among those affected
The disruption extended beyond government departments and technology companies.
Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported problems with their email support services.
Additionally, Taiwanese financial institutions experienced difficulties managing investment and fund-related operations.
US AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic also reported problems involving Microsoft connectors.
Market analyst Josh Gilbert warned that repeated outages could eventually damage customer confidence.
He said businesses might reconsider depending heavily on a single technology provider.
Microsoft previously experienced major service disruptions in January and October.
Consequently, the latest incident increases pressure on the company to demonstrate greater infrastructure reliability.
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