Microsoft outage hits 74 countries as Outlook, Teams, Copilot services fail

Businesses and organisations across 74 countries were hit by a major Microsoft service disruption on Thursday, exposing the risks of relying heavily on cloud-based platforms for everyday operations.

The outage affected Microsoft's Outlook email service, Teams collaboration platform and Copilot artificial intelligence assistant, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access essential workplace tools for several hours.

Downdetector, an outage-tracking platform, reported that the disruption spread globally within an hour, affecting users across the Americas, Europe, Asia and parts of Africa.

In the United States, reports of Outlook problems peaked at about 130,000 shortly after 1pm Eastern Time before dropping to approximately 37,000 by 6pm.

Thousands of other users also reported difficulties accessing Teams and Copilot.

Microsoft attributed the disruption to unusually high traffic on parts of its infrastructure across multiple regions, which it said was likely responsible for the connectivity problems.
Although the company initially indicated that the issue was affecting the Americas, it later warned that Microsoft 365 connectivity could be disrupted for users in any region.

In an update on X, Microsoft said it was “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact”.
Its engineers subsequently suspended deployments, redirected additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure and restarted servers in an attempt to restore services.

However, the recovery process took several hours, with Microsoft reporting limited improvement on Thursday evening.
The company warned that users would reconnect gradually as its infrastructure regained capacity.

Earlier service updates had also cautioned users about intermittent sign-in failures, unexpected account sign-outs and error messages, including “too many requests”.

The disruption highlighted the dependence of businesses, financial institutions, media organisations and other workplaces on Microsoft's cloud-based services, which support email communication, virtual meetings and document collaboration.

For Nigerian organisations using Microsoft 365, the incident raises concerns about the potential consequences of disruptions to a single technology provider.

However, reports available on the outage did not establish whether Nigerian users or organisations were directly affected.

The incident is not the first time Microsoft's services have experienced widespread disruption. In January 2023, Teams, Outlook and Azure were affected by a separate global outage.

Microsoft has yet to explain the specific cause of Thursday's unusual traffic surge or provide a definitive timeline for the complete restoration of services.

The number of complaints recorded by Downdetector represents user-submitted reports rather than independently verified figures of affected customers.