Microsoft’s global outage continued to disrupt businesses and government operations across several countries on Friday, with banking services affected in Hong Kong, government systems facing problems in Australia and Japan, and courts reporting delays in the Philippines. The disruption, which began on Thursday, has left millions of users struggling to access essential services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications.More than 12 hours after the US technology giant first reported the issue, its engineers were still struggling to restore services fully. Microsoft reported some progress but acknowledged that attempts to improve serviceability were not working as expected. The company said it had found no evidence of malicious activity behind the disruption.Here are the top developments from the global Microsoft outage:
- Hong Kong banking services disrupted: Employees at major financial institutions, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, reported disruptions to their work after being unable to access emails and Microsoft Teams. Speaking to CNN, one banker said some emails were arriving sporadically, but millions of messages were potentially stuck in a backlog. The disruption also affected businesses relying on communications with overseas customers.
- Australian government services, schools affected: Schools, courts and government services in Australia experienced disruptions as employees struggled to access Outlook and other Microsoft applications. Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had compared the incident to the CrowdStrike outage of July 2024. Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator. Microsoft did not believe it was dealing with a cyberattack and suspected an update-related problem, he said.
- Japan turns to physical documents: The outage affected government IT infrastructure in Japan, with ministries and agencies struggling to send emails through much of Friday’s working day. Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said government employees were responding by making physical copies of documents. He added that authorities were closely monitoring developments.
- Philippine courts report delays: The Supreme Court of the Philippines said the Microsoft 365 disruption had affected some of its operations. In a post on X, it warned that responses to emails and other transactions could be delayed while the disruption continued.
- Singapore government emails affected: Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government email services were down and that it was working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.
- Indian airlines report email disruptions: IndiGo said the outage had affected its email support services, limiting its ability to receive customer queries. However, its other customer support channels remained operational and flight operations were unaffected. Akasa Air issued an advisory informing passengers about delays in its email support services.
- US businesses face disruption: Several US city governments reported widespread email problems and advised residents to contact local offices by phone where necessary. Industrial technology company Workhorse Group postponed its quarterly earnings conference call because of the disruption.
- AI platforms report connectivity issues: OpenAI and Anthropic also reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, highlighting the wider impact of the outage on platforms that rely on integrations with other companies’ software.
What we know about the Microsoft outage
Microsoft said the disruption was affecting a broad range of Microsoft 365 services that interact with its Exchange Online and email infrastructure. Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot were among the services users reported having trouble accessing.The company said it was taking a measured approach to identifying and repairing the affected infrastructure while exploring different ways to determine the cause of the problem and restore services.The outage spread rapidly, with tracking website Downdetector recording disruptions across 74 countries and territories within roughly an hour. More than 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook at the peak of the disruption on Thursday.Microsoft initially reported that it had made progress in restoring service health and functionality. However, a subsequent update indicated that the changes were not delivering the expected results.“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said in an update on X.The company said it was identifying alternative workstreams to address the disruption and would continue treating the incident with urgency until services were fully restored.