Microsoft outage hits lots of of hundreds throughout 73 nations as ‘repair’ replace issued

Microsoft is continuing to work on a fix after tens of thousands of 365 suite, Teams, Outlook and Copilot users have been hit by a global outage that has hit 73 countries and territories

Tech giant Microsoft says it is continuing to work on a fix for a global outage that has fit a number of its products, causing chaos in the workplace. The outage, which has has caused issues for those using 365 suite, Teams, Outlook and Copilot, began last night (November 12) the company admit a fix is “not taking as expected”.

At its peak last night, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US with over 3,000 reports in the UK. Although reports have now gone down. thousands still remain across multiple countries.

Several workforces were left struggling due to the outage with several of the products down are key business tools, including Teams and Outlook, which saw users even unable to check emails.

In a update, Microsoft said: “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected.

“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.”

Microsoft has since ruled out a cyberattack as the reason for the outage but they are “working to address the issue”. The tech giant said the cause was due to an “elevated load” on its infrastructure.

As reported by Sky News, Microsoft executive vice president Charles Lamanna said the company is “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”.

He wrote on X: “We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue.

“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”

The US and UK were not the only countries affected by the outage as reports came in form the Americas, Europe, and Australia. From data on Downdector it appears Africa were not hit by the issues. However, some reports on social media say Japan, China, Philippines and Singapore have had issues.

Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among the organisations hit by widespread outage of Microsoft programs.

There has also been reports of UK police forces, council and government departments continuing to face issues this morning. Similar scenes have been seen in the US with reports the outage has hit the courts.

Users took to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to vent their frustration.

One user wrote: “Tens of millions of people can’t send emails, can’t join meetings, Copilot is playing dead, and they can’t even open the Microsoft 365 admin center. What is Microsoft doing?”

Another added: “Microsoft Outlook outage when I’m having an absolute nightmare of a workday.”

A third saw light in the situation and joked: “The Microsoft outage is just a sign that you should not be working on Fridays.”

Microsoft has since released a further update saying a new patch for 365 has seen “positive results”.

They wrote: “We’re seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure.

“We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online.

“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution.

“Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defence-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report.”