Microsoft said on Thursday it was not aware of any malicious activity behind a major global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and its Copilot AI assistant, as efforts to restore services continued to encounter difficulties.
The hours-long disruption, which the technology giant attributed to increased demand on its infrastructure, affected users in 74 countries and territories, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
Businesses and government departments were among those affected, with users around the world reporting difficulties accessing email and other Microsoft 365 services.
"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution," Microsoft said.
The company acknowledged that initial attempts to restore services had not produced the expected results and that engineers were exploring alternative solutions.
"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," Microsoft said on X.
"We're identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity," it added, without indicating when services would be fully restored.
Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of disruptions in the Americas, but later confirmed that the problem appeared to be affecting "Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region."
The company's cloud-based Microsoft 365 subscription service includes widely used applications such as Outlook and Teams.
"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," Microsoft said.
"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it added.
Downdetector reported that the disruption had spread globally within an hour, affecting Microsoft products across 74 countries and territories.
A map published by the outage monitoring service showed reports from users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.
In New Zealand, the foreign ministry warned that its communications had been affected, including those of diplomatic missions around the world.
Its "ability to receive emails has been affected by the global Microsoft outage. This also impacts all New Zealand Embassies, Consulates and Representative Offices around the world," the ministry said in a notice.
Thousands of users also reported problems accessing Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector.
As the outage continued, Microsoft issued a series of updates detailing attempts to restore connectivity, including efforts to redirect user traffic away from affected servers.
Shortly after 11pm, the company reported that it was "observing limited recovery" as engineers worked to ease pressure on its infrastructure.
"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," Microsoft said.
Downdetector subsequently recorded a sharp decline in disruption reports from users in Washington and Hong Kong at around 4.50am GMT, although Microsoft had not confirmed a full restoration of services.
