Microsoft issues update on Outlook service amid major global outage ongoing since Thursday evening

Microsoft said its email services were “approaching normal levels” as it continues to resolve a major global outage ongoing since Thursday early evening.

The tech giant was forced to scramble to find new ways to restore services after a global outage has left users worldwide without access to emails and Teams as it admitted fixes were not going “as expected”.

The issue began late on Thursday afternoon and has seen users unable to access many of its most popular services, with thousands worldwide reporting they are unable to send and receive emails through Outlook. Teams has also been affected for many, with the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services also disrupted.

However, in a new statement, the company said: “We’re continuing to see improvements in service availability, with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels. Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues.”

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak last night. Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.

The firm said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes. “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said.

Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector.

Problems were flagged from a range of countries, including the UK, US, India and New Zealand. Reports about Outlook peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level and, on Friday, users from around 60 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, continue to record trouble. Governments, courts, charities and banks around the world also reported Microsoft outages.

The Microsoft outage also shows the risk of the UK’s dependency on a limited number of foreign technology firms, the chairwoman of an influential Commons committee said.

Dame Chi Onwurah, chairwoman of the Science and Technology Committee, said: “The global Microsoft outage only serves to highlight once again the lack of resilience in the UK’s digital infrastructure and the dangers that this dependency can pose to our security, economy and public services.

“My committee’s report on delivering a digital government concluded that the UK is hugely dependent on a small number of US-based technology providers for our public services, preventing homegrown alternatives from developing.

“In its response, the Government could not tell us how much it was spending on IT and digital – or who it was spending it with – without even knowing this, how can we protect against vendor lock-in or achieve the resilience and digital sovereignty the UK needs?”