A more than 12-hour outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams crippled communications for businesses and governments globally yesterday, forcing some organisations to revert to fax machines and halting at least one bond repurchase in Europe.
Microsoft said server issues were behind the incident that also affected its Copilot AI assistant and that a broader roll-out of software fixes was starting to stabilise the system. It said it was not aware of any malicious activity.
Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications with hundreds of millions of users. The outage prevented people from performing essential functions such as sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.
It affected government agencies from Australia to Japan and the United States, caused delays at trading firms, hindered some companies from publishing earnings and prompted airlines to warn customers of communication lags, according to public statements.
&uuid=(email))