Microsoft hit by global outages: What happened and why?

What the report says

Microsoft said it was still working to restore Outlook, Teams and Copilot after a broad outage disrupted its workplace services across 74 countries. The problems began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday and continued into Friday, with users reporting trouble accessing email and related tools on web, desktop and mobile. By Friday morning, Microsoft said its recovery efforts had met only “marginal success” and that some restored servers were failing again.

According to the company, the disruption was tied to elevated load across multiple regions and servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, rather than a cyberattack. Microsoft said it was reviewing server performance, applying patches and rolling back a network change while trying to improve capacity. It has not identified a root cause publicly, and it did not offer a timeline for full recovery.

The outage affected a wide range of users and organizations, including government systems in Singapore and Japan, the Supreme Court of the Philippines, and police and intelligence agencies in Australia. Al Jazeera reported that third-party services and integrations that rely on Microsoft systems were also affected, underscoring how widely used the company’s cloud and collaboration tools are in business and public-sector operations.

Technology analysts quoted by Al Jazeera said the episode appears to be a technical failure rather than malicious activity, and that recovery is complicated when overloaded servers reconnect and generate fresh traffic spikes. Microsoft said service may return gradually as capacity is restored.