Gambiaj.com – (LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM) – Microsoft is struggling to resolve a global outage affecting its Outlook email service and other products, including Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, with the disruption spreading to 74 countries and territories.
The US technology giant said on Thursday, November 12, that its initial measures to restore services were not producing the expected results, forcing engineers to explore alternative solutions to address capacity problems and persistent imbalances in network traffic.
The outage, which lasted for several hours, has disrupted access to Microsoft 365 services across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.
Microsoft said it had identified unusually high demand on its infrastructure as a contributing factor but had yet to establish a definitive cause of the incident.
The company also said it had found no evidence of malicious activity or a cyberattack behind the disruption.
In an update, Microsoft said a corrective measure had produced some positive results in improving server stability, although it could not provide a timeline for a full restoration of services.
“We regret that today’s outages have caused inconvenience to our customers, and we are working to resolve this issue,” Charles Lamanna, one of Microsoft’s executive vice presidents, said in a statement on X.
The disruption has also affected government and public services in several countries. New Zealand issued an advisory warning that its ability to receive emails had been affected, adding that the disruption extended to its embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions worldwide.
UK Health Services Face Disruption
In the United Kingdom, the outage has reportedly had serious consequences for healthcare services, particularly the handling of patient information.
Rachel Harrison, public services lead at the GMB trade union, said staff working on the NHS 111 medical advice line and the 999 emergency service were struggling to transmit patient information through their usual channels.
She warned that the disruption had created a significant backlog of work and could lead to serious operational difficulties.
However, she said emergency interventions themselves appeared to have remained unaffected.
Microsoft has apologized to customers and pledged to investigate the full causes of the incident once services have been restored.
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