Millions worldwide have been cut off from Outlook email, Teams messaging and other Microsoft 365 tools for more than 12 hours, causing widespread disruption to financial systems, public administration, courts and aviation across multiple continents.
The outage commenced Thursday in the Americas region and rapidly expanded globally, with Downdetector reporting that incident notifications "reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour". The tracking service documented a tenfold surge in UK reports at 17:43 UTC, followed by waves of disruptions as India and New Zealand entered their business hours.
Microsoft has dismissed the possibility of a security breach. Charles Lamanna, executive vice president for Copilot, Agents, and Platform at the company, stated on X that "There is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."
https://x.com/clamanna/status/2121085008966529423?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Resolving the problem has proven far more challenging than initial assessments suggested. After initially reporting encouraging progress, Microsoft acknowledged overnight that its traffic rerouting and strategic blocking measures were delivering only incomplete recovery rather than the sustained restoration needed.
Clues about the underlying cause emerged from an unexpected quarter. Tony Burke, Australia's home affairs minister, disclosed to journalists in Sydney that Microsoft believes the issue resembles the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, describing it as "an update that has gone awry", according to CNN reporting. Australia's intelligence service and national police force are among the affected organisations.
The impact has been staggering across major financial and government institutions. Staff at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs offices in Hong Kong reported being locked out of email and Teams throughout the day, CNN sources said. Japan's government reverted to paper-based communications, with ministries unable to use email for most of Friday, according to a deputy chief cabinet secretary. The Philippine Supreme Court cautioned of processing delays, while Australian educational institutions and courts faced empty inboxes. Municipal governments in the United States, including Miami Beach and Austin, directed residents to use telephone contact instead. A Colorado sheriff's department noted that the outage postponed prisoner bond payment processing. Airlines such as IndiGo and Akasa Air experienced disruptions to email-based customer support, and electric vehicle manufacturer Workhorse delayed its earnings presentation.
Financial institutions are already bracing for secondary threats. Standard Chartered, ING Australia and other banks have alerted customers to watch for fraudsters impersonating technical support personnel who are exploiting the situation. The danger is compounded by the fact that email security systems that would normally filter such scams remain offline.
The timing carries particular significance for Europe, as the outage coincided with the day EU leadership convened in Dublin to address strategies for reducing technological reliance on foreign providers. The continent's experience with the 2024 CrowdStrike disruption had already highlighted its vulnerability to concentration among a small number of American technology suppliers, and calls for structural changes to this dependency have intensified since that incident.
As Friday morning progressed, the world's primary workplace platform remained offline, with no email service restored.
Source: The Next Web
