Microsoft rules out cyberattack in outage affecting 74 countries

Microsoft said on Friday it does not believe a cyberattack or malicious activity was behind the widespread outage that disrupted services such as Outlook, Teams, and Copilot in 74 countries and regions. The company explained the disruption was due to high pressure on its infrastructure, and noted that efforts to fully restore services are ongoing.

Charles Lamanna, a corporate vice president at Microsoft, stated on X that “there is no indication of malicious activity or a cyberattack” behind the outage, which affected Outlook and other products for several hours. The disruption lasted through most of the US workday and extended to users across the Americas, parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa, according to outage tracking site Downdetector.

Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of outages in the Americas, but later clarified that the issue affected users’ ability to connect to Microsoft 365 services in any region. Microsoft 365 offers applications such as Outlook and Teams through a cloud subscription.

The company posted on X that it had identified high pressure on part of its infrastructure in multiple regions, which was likely the cause of the outages. Microsoft said it temporarily halted all deployments, was redirecting data traffic away from affected infrastructure, and was restarting impacted servers.

In the United States, about 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook after 1 p.m. Eastern Time (18:00 GMT), with reports dropping to around 37,000 by 6 p.m. (23:00 GMT), according to Downdetector. Thousands of users also reported problems with Teams and Copilot.

As the outage persisted for several hours, Microsoft posted a series of updates on X confirming ongoing efforts to restore full service. In an update after 6 p.m., the company said it was seeing limited recovery and was working to reroute user data traffic away from affected servers, expecting a gradual return to normal as applications reconnected.