The global Microsoft service outage that has left millions without access to the company’s Outlook email service, Teams meeting tools and the AI assistant Copilot, was gradually being addressed early Friday morning as the company worked to fix the problem.
Microsoft, which serves an estimated 450 million users worldwide, said there is no evidence of a cyberattack and attributed the disruption to servers that were overloaded and failed.
The outage reportedly began at around 10:40 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Thursday and quickly reached more than 70 countries and territories around the world, according to the online platform Downdetector, which tracks and reports digital service disruptions.
Organizations affected included banks, government agencies and healthcare providers.
In a Nov. 13 report by the Associated Press, Tony Burke, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, said Microsoft compared the disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage.
“They (Microsoft) don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack,” Burke said. “They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry.”
