Global Outlook outage: Microsoft rules out a cyberattack

An outage of Microsoft's Outlook email service has hit users in 74 countries and territories since Thursday, November 12. Teams and Copilot were also disrupted. Microsoft says there is no sign so far of malicious activity or a cyberattack.

The outage began on Thursday at about 11:17 a.m. Haiti time, when users in the Americas lost access to their mailboxes on the web and in the apps. Microsoft later acknowledged that users in every region were affected.

Tens of thousands of reports

At its peak, nearly 140,000 reports were logged worldwide on the Downdetector website, more than 130,000 of them in the United States. Microsoft has not said how many users were affected.

A gradual recovery

The company blames excessive load on its infrastructure in several regions. It says it has seen "improved service stability" and is extending its fixes to all affected regions. On Friday, service had been restored in parts of Asia-Pacific, but disruptions continued elsewhere.