Microsoft 365 services suffer worldwide outage across 74 countries

Microsoft 365 services have been hit by a major worldwide technical outage that began at 11:32 pm on Thursday, Bangladesh time. The disruption, which has lasted more than 14 hours, has left users across 74 countries unable to access key tools including the Outlook email service, Microsoft Teams and Word 365 online.

According to Downdetector, a platform that monitors website and service status, the issues spread rapidly across the globe within an hour of the initial failure. At the height of the disruption in the United States, the site recorded more than 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook around 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. Earlier, at 11:30 p.m. ET, the platform had logged more than 18,000 reports of issues.

Microsoft has blamed the outage on server problems. In a service health notice, the company stated that features relying on Exchange Online, its cloud-based messaging platform, were primarily affected, while other elements that did not rely on the system remained functional. Exchange Online is the company's core cloud-based platform responsible for delivering email, calendar, contacts and tasks.

The outage has impacted a wide range of organisations, including government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States. Major technology companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, reported difficulties with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air noted that their email support services were impacted by the failure.

In Bangladesh, users at various corporate organisations have reported being unable to access Microsoft services since the outage began. Mostafizur Rahman, an official at a research organisation, stated that his office had been unable to use Microsoft Outlook since the previous night. He noted that although the office was closed on Friday, all online work had come to a halt due to the service failure.

The disruption stretched into Asia-Pacific business hours on Friday, affecting countries including India, Australia and Japan. The scale of the incident has prompted concerns regarding the reliability of Microsoft's infrastructure for corporate clients, particularly as this is the latest in a series of technical failures for the company.

Microsoft experienced similar outages with its 365 services in January of this year and in October last year. Additionally, the company reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform last month, which similarly impacted its suite of productivity software and a range of industries worldwide. As the company works to resolve the current server issues, users continue to face significant challenges in accessing essential digital tools.