From the US to several Asian countries, Microsoft's outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and affected many users, companies, and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.
Microsoft's service health page showed "service degradation" for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers, as well as its consumer products, as of an update at 11.16 am India time on Friday.
The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to pinpoint the underlying cause of a traffic influx and to recover its back-end servers.
"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident," it said, adding that full details of the root cause would be shared in a post-incident report once the issue is mitigated.
As things stand, here are the five latest updates about the global outage that you may want to know:
1. Microsoft has ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack. According to British media, the global outage may have been caused by issues with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 up and running.
2. British government engineers were tasked with working alongside Microsoft to fix the issue at the earliest. It was not immediately known if UK government offices were hit by the outage. "Government engineers and the systems are working with Microsoft at the moment. I would expect that to be able to be detailed throughout the day. But as more people come online with their working days shortly," Industry Minister Luke Pollard reportedly told Times Radio.
3. About an hour ago, Microsoft confirmed that it was "seeing positive results" as it worked on server stability. The technical team tried applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch, The Guardian quoted a company official as saying. "We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online," he reportedly said.
4. The Japanese government, however, has not been as lucky. The country has developed a shared digital network that government agencies use to send information to ministries and other official bodies. This network was hit by the outage. Tokyo confirmed that the government’s email services had become unavailable and the affected offices have been asked to switch to text messaging as an "emergency measure".
5. OpenAI and Anthropic each reported that they were facing problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies' software.
