Microsoft issues urgent update as major outage hits Outlook and Teams worldwide

Outlook outage enters second day as Microsoft attempts recovery

The company said the problem began after several of its servers became "unexpectedly unavailable". 

This pushed extra traffic onto the remaining systems, putting them under pressure and affecting access to its services.

Microsoft has described the cause as "elevated load" on its infrastructure, meaning its servers were dealing with more demand than they could handle. It has not attributed the incident to a cyber attack.

The scale of the disruption was reflected in reports to Downdetector, which recorded almost 140,000 complaints about Outlook at around 6pm GMT on Thursday.

Users reported a range of problems, including being unable to send or receive emails, open certain files or access calendar details.

Initial attempts to restore normal service did not go as planned, with Microsoft saying its fixes were "not taking as expected". 

By Friday morning, however, the company said it had seen "marginal success" in its recovery work.

Microsoft is continuing to track activity across different regions, checking the status of its servers and assessing how it can increase capacity to get its services back to normal.

999 and 101 advice issued as police websites suffer disruption

The effects of Microsoft's global outage are being felt across public services, with police forces and GP surgeries among those warning people about possible disruption.

The Metropolitan Police has told the public that some online form submissions may be affected. 

Anyone making a time-critical report that is not an emergency has been advised to call 101, while people needing urgent assistance should continue to use 999.

Greater Manchester Police and North Yorkshire Police have issued similar warnings on their websites. 

The disruption has also affected government organisations overseas. Singapore's government and Australia's intelligence agency have both confirmed problems linked to the outage.

Major technology companies have reported knock-on effects too. OpenAI said it was investigating connection problems involving Microsoft services, which had affected the way some of its tools were working. Anthropic has also reported issues related to the incident.