A widespread outage of Microsoft services that began on Thursday evening, Israel time, was still disrupting users in Israel and around the world on Friday morning. Outlook, Teams, the Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services were affected, and in Japan the disruption reached government systems.
Many users said they could not open their email inboxes on their computers. Messages on mobile phones would open only in preview mode. The Associated Press reported that the outage hit Outlook and other Microsoft services and also affected government operations.
Thousands of users reported problems with Teams, the company's workplace communication app, as well as with Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services. In its most recent update on its service status page, posted at 7 a.m. Israel time on Friday, Microsoft said: "We are working on several workstreams to mitigate the impact, address the current blockage, and restore parts of the service infrastructure to a healthy state."
Microsoft said in social media posts that it was investigating the disruption. The company said parts of its infrastructure had experienced increased load, which was one of the causes of the connection errors. It also found that some servers had failed automated health checks, and the workarounds it tried to bring them back online did not have an immediate effect.
"We are working hard in every way to reduce the impact," the Microsoft 365 Status account wrote on X. On Thursday, the company said it had restored Teams in North America, though some users continued to report connection problems.
According to AP, the first reports of the outage came in on Thursday afternoon US Eastern time, and the disruption continued through the night. Shortly after 1 p.m. Eastern time, the outage tracking site Downdetector had logged nearly 130,000 reports of problems accessing Outlook.
The number of new reports later fell from that peak. Many users still said they could not send or receive messages or load their inboxes. In many parts of Asia, reports continued into late Friday morning local time.
