Overview
- A global outage that began late Thursday left many users unable to access Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot and caused large spikes in incident reports.
- Microsoft applied mitigation steps such as isolating parts of its infrastructure and rerouting traffic but said the changes were not taking as expected and servers that briefly came back online crashed again.
- Some police forces reported they cannot receive online form submissions and asked the public to call 101 for time‑critical non‑emergencies and 999 for emergencies, while other forces such as Hampshire Constabulary said their 999 and 101 phone lines remain unaffected.
- Third parties were hit too: OpenAI reported broken Microsoft connectors that disrupted new links and tools, and governments in countries including Australia, India and Japan reported related outages.
- Monitoring site Downdetector showed a major surge in user reports, with nearly 130,000 Outlook issues at peak, underscoring how deep reliance on Microsoft’s cloud can quickly interrupt email, reporting and collaboration until services are stabilised.