A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted email, collaboration and AI services across dozens of countries, with Outlook, Teams and Copilot among the affected tools. Microsoft said the disruption touched a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services, and users reported the services down for hours. The company, based in Redmond, Washington, said it had no indication the outage was caused by malicious activity.

Microsoft said its recovery efforts were making progress, describing "early stabilization and capacity improvements" and "incremental improvement in several workloads", while cautioning that service health remained variable and capacity had not yet fully returned to baseline. Problems appeared to persist according to an outage tracking site, status reports from dependent organisations and anecdotal social media reports, and at one point the company said earlier changes were not taking effect as expected. The company said it was using a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure and treating the incident with urgency until full resolution.S2S5

The effects reached public services and institutions well beyond the tech sector. The British government said it was working closely with Microsoft to assess the impact on public services and that contingency plans were in place, while British police forces said they could not receive crime reports online and urged people to call emergency responders. The National Pharmacy Association warned that prescriptions could be delayed because the outage was hitting the email systems of the state-run National Health Service.S2S5

In Portugal, the Shared Services of the Ministry of Health confirmed the outage was affecting bodies under the ministry, and several ministers reportedly lacked email access. A government source said an internal IT network unaffected by the outage had kept executive work going, with ministers using messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal, while the government's secretary-general said normal functioning was guaranteed through secure alternative means. Schools were also affected: the president of the Association of Directors of Grouped and Public Schools, Filinto Lima, said teachers and pupils could not reach institutional email or Teams, which is where homework and assignments are posted.S3

Microsoft said it had made additional progress toward service recovery, with improvements being made to email access, and that email delivery was being restored as recovery actions continued in phases across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure. The company had reported more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions in January, giving a sense of the scale of users potentially touched by the disruption, which the outage tracking and status reports indicated had not fully ended.S1S2