HONG KONG -- From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue. Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down. The extent of the outage wasn’t clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions. The company indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress Friday, saying it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements,” and that there was “incremental improvement in several workloads.” But problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company’s services and anecdotal reports on social media. Microsoft scrambles to recover services The Redmond, Wash.-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.” The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.” A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control. Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue. An earlier post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution. “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote. In a pair of more recent updates on Friday, Microsoft said “we’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.” “Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases,” the company said in a second post. “We’re seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.” Governments, businesses from Japan to Australia affected The British government said it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services but that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption. British police forces said they’re unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call emergency responders to make any urgent reports. The National Pharmacy Association said people could face delays getting their prescriptions because the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Service. Hospitals urged patients to attend appointments as usual. U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage. In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. That outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers. Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption. “They (Microsoft) don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told reporters in Sydney. Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company could not receive updates from its U.S. customers throughout Outlook. If the situation dragged on further, this could “impact the production timeline,” he said. Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also saw part of their operations disrupted. Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement. IndiGo, another Indian airline company, also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected. Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said that government emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue. The Philippines’ Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its operations, including email responses. In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government’s IT infrastructure and that officials were “keeping a close eye on the developments.” Japanese authorities had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools such as telephones, the government said. OpenAI and Anthropic each reported that they were facing problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software. ------ By Chan Ho-him AP journalists Adam Schreck in Bangkok, Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi, Mayuko Ono in Tokyo and Pan Pylas in London contributed.
