A worldwide outage hit Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot on Thursday, disrupting access for tens of thousands of users across 74 countries and territories. The company attributed the problem to elevated infrastructure loads and said it was working to restore services.

Hours after the initial disruption, recovery remained limited, leaving many users still unable to reliably reach their services.S1

The disruption reached Hong Kong's financial sector on Friday morning, when temporary unavailability of Outlook left employees unable to work as usual. After discovering the software was down, some staff had to work offline, according to sources from multiple banks.S2

Bankers at Goldman Sachs and Nomura said their work had been disrupted, with one Nomura employee saying the team had not been able to send or receive emails since the early hours of the morning and that the problem was still ongoing.S2