Microsoft global outage live after attempts fail to restore Outlook and Copilot services

Microsoft users are continuing to experience disruption as the tech giant worked to resolve outages impacting some of its most popular services. Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday.

The outage is affecting Outlook emails, Teams and AI service Copilot and has been ongoing for more than 10 hours. Tens of thousands of users have been hit by the outages.

Microsoft is scrambling to solve the issue, but has said the fix is not going "as expected"

The company said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes. “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” Microsoft said.

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

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A 'This site can't be reached' message greets many people trying to access their Outlook emails this morning.

Microsoft said efforts to fix the outage are not going as planned

South Wales Police said it is affected by the Microsoft outage. The police force is experiencing issues receiving reports made via the website form, and is asking everyone with a non-emergency to contact them via 101.

Overnight, Microsoft said its its team is "seeing positive results" in its efforts to restart affected systems and is actively monitoring their performance. However, the company has since said the fix is not going "as expected"

In its latest update, Microsoft said it is working on getting services back up and running.

"We're continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimisation actions to improve service stability and increase capacity," it said in a post on X.

Microsoft is struggling to fix a major global outage reportedly affecting tens of thousands of users including the US, Japan, Singapore, the UK and Australia. Services include Teams, Outlook and Microsoft's artificial intelligence software Copilot have been affected by "connectivity problems".

It has been ongoing for at least the for around 12 hours. Reports of problems with Outlook peaked globally at nearly 140,000 around 6pm on Thursday, according to monitoring website Downdetector.

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