Microsoft works to restore services as outages continue worldwide

Microsoft was continuing efforts to restore some of its most widely used services on Friday.

placeholder image — Microsoft was continuing efforts to restore some of its most widely used services on Friday.

Microsoft users were still reporting disruption on Friday after outages hit Teams, Outlook, Copilot and some cloud services, while the company said there was no sign of cyber activity.

Microsoft users were still facing problems on Friday as the company continued efforts to repair outages affecting some of its most widely used services.

The first significant spike in reports came on Downdetector at around 6.15pm on Thursday, when UK users began flagging issues with Microsoft Teams. Problems were still being reported at 3am the following morning.

Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.

“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” he wrote on X.

“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”

The affected services included instant messaging platform Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of its Cloud services, among others.

In an update on Friday, Microsoft said that although it had managed to get servers operating multiple times overnight UK time, those servers had crashed.

The company said it had tried several measures to reduce the impact, 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,” Microsoft said.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported problems.

“We’re investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected,” OpenAI said in a statement on its website.

“We’ll share an update when we know more.”

Microsoft provided regular updates on official Microsoft 365 accounts. It had earlier directed users to a page on its website for information, but people complained the page would not load.

Multiple governments around the world also reported Microsoft outages, including in Australia, India and Japan.