Microsoft faces a major Outlook outage: ‘no signs of a cyberattack’

A massive Microsoft outage left millions around the world without access to essential digital tools. The disruption hit emails and products such as Teams and the AI Assistant Copilot. Outage tracker Down Detector reported that hundreds of thousands of people had flagged problems with Outlook. And at least 74 countries were affected, including Japan. Microsoft 365's outage spread worldwide early today Japan time and several services such as Outlook are not functioning. The government's IT infrastructure has also been affected. I understand that the company is working on restoring the system and we're keeping a close eye on the developments. Thank you very much. Microsoft, however, said that the efforts to repair the system weren't going as expected, with the firm seeking alternative solutions. Its platforms are integrated within all sorts of different tech services, meaning that some other major platforms are feeling the ripple effect of the outage, including OpenAI and Anthropic. It was also not immediately clear what exactly caused the failure. The perspective of Microsoft at this stage, they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event. They believe they are dealing with a cyber attack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry. Hundreds of millions of people and companies use Microsoft on a daily basis. Governments, hospitals and private firms across the world are impacted by the outage that experts say could already be one of the worst in history and could lead to major financial losses. The outage also highlights the risk of depending on a single technology provider which can be brought to a standstill in a second.