Microsoft outage: AI or cyber attack?

Microsoft outage

Microsoft users continued to experience disruption today as the tech giant worked to resolve outages affecting some of its most popular services.

Affected services

Affected products include the instant messaging service Teams, the AI service Copilot, Outlook email and some aspects of its Cloud services.

Outage scale

By 6pm UK time, Microsoft users had logged nearly 140,000 reports of issues with Outlook, more than 2,000 times normal levels.

Global impact

The outage has affected customers worldwide, stopping email services even behind the 'Great Firewall' in China.

Microsoft response

In a post on X, Microsoft says that it was 'continuing to work on' recovering services but there is no clear timeline for when they will be fully back to normal.

Possible causes

Microsoft determined a number of servers failed during automated health checks and that its alternatives to bring those servers back online were not immediately taking effect.

AI cause?

Dr Mark Gregory, associate professor of the School of Engineering at RMIT University, says: 'The Microsoft outage appears to have been caused by a misconfiguration of networking systems and infrastructure.'

“The Microsoft outage appears to have been caused by a misconfiguration of networking systems and infrastructure.”

Cyber attack?

Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.

Nvidia connection?

Microsoft is a major customer for these chips, having purchased more than 200,000 advanced AI chips in October last year, on top of 485,000 chips in 2024.

Affected industries

In Westminster, MPs are reportedly unable to access their parliamentary accounts.

Health services

The Aneurin Bevan University Health Board in Gwent, south-east Wales, said that it was 'aware of a global Microsoft outage which may be affecting our services'.

Police services

Northamptonshire Police said in a post on X: 'Due to the global Microsoft outage please note that we do not have access to emails (Outlook).'

Investor impact

Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely look past the outage but that repeated disruptions could hurt Microsoft over time.

Global reach

The outage is affecting users across the Americas and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Email preservation

To help preserve delayed mail during this event, Microsoft has extended email timeout to 48 hours.

What happened next

Microsoft is struggling to fix the widespread outage, with the company having acknowledged that efforts to restore services were 'not taking as expected'.