Almost 20,000 reports a minute as Microsoft hit by widespread outage

Microsoft is struggling to restore full functionality to a range of its apps and platforms after a global outage triggered by a problem with its servers, which Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said was not due to a cyberattack.

The widespread outage hit Microsoft Outlook, Teams and Copilot causing users to have issues accessing or sending emails, while other errors affected the tech giant’s apps.

Nearly 130,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook and other Microsoft services, beginning just before 5am (AEDT). At one point, reports to the platform reached almost 20,000 per minute, stemming from outages across five Microsoft services in 74 countries.

New reports have since fallen from that peak, but many said they still couldn’t send and receive emails, or had trouble loading their inboxes.

Issues among Australians were still common as of 11am on Friday. Affected users told this masthead that their Outlook email access had stopped working early on Friday, then resumed working for several hours, before subsequently failing again.

A large swathe of corporate Australia as well as government departments and agencies were among those affected, including the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and parts of the Queensland Health Department.

Thousands also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app Teams, as well as its AI assistant Copilot and wider Microsoft 365 services.

To fix the issue, Microsoft said it had so far attempted to restart its servers, and validate a change. But initial efforts to fully restore services proved unsuccessful.

“We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” the company said. “Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.”

A subsequent update issued shortly after 10am AEDT said the company had “begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they’re remaining stable so far.”

“We’ve also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions,” it said.

Microsoft said it was implementing “protective traffic management measures” region by region to test if it helped with restoring its services.

“[We are] fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly.

“We’re also analysing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.”

At a press conference in Sydney on Friday morning, Burke said he had been briefed by Australia’s cybersecurity coordinator and the head of Microsoft Australia and that they did not believe they were dealing with a cyberthreat.

“The perspective of Microsoft at this stage … they believe in some ways [similar] to what we saw with CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said.

Microsoft said it was “also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.”

In updates posted earlier, it said it was aware of users “experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes”.

Microsoft later explained that a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load”, which it said was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”. The company determined several servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” due to a problem that caused them to fail during automated checks.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” the Microsoft 365 Status account wrote on X.

The company earlier said it had “successfully restored” problems related to Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.