Overview
- The outage began Thursday afternoon at about 17:00 Dutch time and has left Outlook, Teams and Microsoft AI features such as Copilot partly unavailable in multiple regions.
- Microsoft says the problem was not a cyberattack but that several servers suddenly became unavailable, which overloaded remaining infrastructure and reduced service capacity.
- A restart attempt to recover affected systems failed at around 03:00 local time and Microsoft continues active recovery work while posting live updates on its status page.
- The disruption is regional rather than universal: many Microsoft 365 users remain unaffected, but cross-border companies are experiencing cascading workflow problems such as lost email access and stalled meetings.
- The incident underscores operational risk from heavy reliance on a single cloud provider and could prompt businesses to review backup plans, alternate communication channels and contingency procedures.