A major global Microsoft outage has disrupted access to Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services, leaving thousands of users across Australia and internationally unable to access critical workplace applications.
The disruption began early Friday morning Australian time, with users reporting difficulties sending and receiving emails, accessing inboxes and connecting to Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity tools.
According to outage monitoring platform Downdetector, nearly 130,000 reports of Microsoft service problems were recorded globally at the peak of the disruption. In Australia, more than 4,400 reports of Outlook issues had been recorded by 8.20am AEDT.
Microsoft confirmed that connectivity issues were affecting multiple services, including Exchange Online, Teams and SharePoint Online, with users across different regions potentially impacted.
“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
The outage also extended to Microsoft 365 Copilot and several enterprise security and management platforms, including Microsoft Defender, Intune and Purview.
Microsoft initially attributed the connectivity problems to elevated infrastructure loads across multiple regions, before identifying that several servers had unexpectedly become unavailable.
“We’ve determined that the elevated load isn’t driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure,” Microsoft said in a service update.
The company subsequently identified a problem causing servers to fail automated health checks, resulting in connectivity errors and placing additional pressure on remaining infrastructure.
As part of its recovery efforts, Microsoft paused deployments and configuration changes, redirected traffic away from affected infrastructure and began restarting servers.
The technology giant also tested an alternative health-check process to restore affected servers, with the change subsequently being applied more broadly.
The disruption extended beyond Microsoft’s own applications, affecting integrations with third-party artificial intelligence platforms.
OpenAI reported issues with its Microsoft connectors, including problems establishing new connections and accessing tools. Anthropic also confirmed that an upstream provider issue had affected its Microsoft 365 connector.
Microsoft has reported limited recovery in some regions as affected servers are progressively restored and traffic is redirected through alternative routes.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service,” Microsoft said.
The company is continuing to investigate potential configuration changes that may have contributed to the incident, with no definitive root cause or timeframe for full restoration confirmed at the time of reporting.
