Microsoft Outage Affects 74 Countries and Territories Worldwide

Microsoft has reported difficulties in restoring its affected infrastructure following a major global technical outage that disrupted several of its key services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, affecting thousands of users, businesses and government institutions worldwide.

The disruption began late Thursday and continued into Friday morning, with the company acknowledging that its efforts to restore isolated server availability and bring affected infrastructure back online had not delivered the expected results.

Microsoft said it was continuing to monitor the performance of the affected infrastructure components as technical teams worked to restore normal service.

According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, reports of service disruptions were recorded across 74 countries and territories within approximately one hour. Reports concerning Outlook alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their usual level, the platform said in a post on X.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he had been briefed on the incident. He noted that Microsoft did not currently believe the disruption was the result of a cyberattack.

“From Microsoft’s perspective at this stage, they don’t believe they are dealing with a cyber incident,” Burke said, adding that the situation appeared similar to the CrowdStrike outage, in which a faulty software update caused widespread disruption.

The impact was also reported in New Zealand, where government agencies and businesses were forced to revert to manual operating procedures. Immigration New Zealand temporarily suspended the processing of all visa applications due to the disruption.

In Canada, Unity Health Toronto declared a Code Grey, a hospital emergency designation used to indicate an infrastructure failure or loss of essential systems.

The healthcare organisation confirmed that its email system had been disrupted but stressed that patient and resident care remained unaffected.

“Our hospitals remain fully operational and open to providing care,” the organisation said.

The incident has once again highlighted the dependence of businesses, government agencies and essential services on major technology infrastructure providers, as well as the potential consequences of widespread disruptions to critical digital systems.