A major global outage affecting Microsoft's cloud-based productivity services has disrupted businesses, government departments, educational institutions and other organisations across multiple countries, leaving millions of users struggling to access Outlook email, Microsoft Teams and other widely used workplace applications.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, has also affected users in the Gulf, including the UAE, as the technology giant continues efforts to restore services. The incident has highlighted the dependence of businesses and public institutions on Microsoft's software infrastructure for everyday communications and operations.
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, reports of disruptions involving Microsoft services spread to 74 countries and territories within about an hour. In the US, nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems were recorded shortly after 1pm Eastern Time on Thursday.
Problems were reported across Outlook, Teams, Microsoft 365 and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, with users experiencing difficulties accessing mailboxes, sending and receiving messages and using various cloud-based applications.
The disruption extended beyond email and messaging. Microsoft's service-status updates identified problems affecting Exchange Online, SharePoint, Microsoft Copilot, Planner, To Do, Power BI, Microsoft Defender, Intune and several administrative and security tools.
The company said the impact was particularly significant for services dependent on Exchange Online, its cloud-based email platform. While core Teams messaging and online meetings remained largely functional, features relying on Exchange Online, including calendar access, meeting scheduling and certain organisational chat functions, were affected.
Microsoft struggles to restore services
Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated loads across parts of its infrastructure in multiple regions. It subsequently clarified that the problem was not caused by an increase in user traffic, but by a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable.
In updates published through its Microsoft 365 service-status channel, the company said it was redistributing traffic across its global infrastructure, restarting affected servers and attempting to restore capacity.
However, its initial recovery measures did not deliver 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 one update, adding that it was exploring alternative measures to increase capacity and address traffic-management imbalances.
The company later reported limited recovery in some regions but cautioned that the improvements were not translating into sustained service restoration.
Its latest recovery efforts include adjusting traffic protocols, redistributing connections, restricting certain traffic and investigating network configuration changes that may be contributing to the problem.
Microsoft has also ruled out a cyberattack as the cause. Executive Charles Lamanna said there was no indication that the disruption resulted from malicious or cyber activity, according to reports.
The Gulf is among the affected markets. Downdetector's UAE platform recorded a sharp increase in complaints involving Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams on Friday morning, indicating that users in the country were also experiencing difficulties accessing the services.
The National and Gulf News reported that the disruption was affecting Microsoft customers in the UAE, with businesses and other organisations facing difficulties accessing their workplace applications.
The scale of the incident has also extended to companies providing other technology services. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with tools relying on Microsoft 365 connectors, illustrating how disruptions to a major cloud platform can affect services beyond its own product portfolio.
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