Outlook and Teams work again after day-and-a-half outage

Microsoft says it has fixed the fault that knocked out its 365 apps, including the email program Outlook and the meeting app Teams, for about a day and a half. The outage began on Thursday afternoon and hit more than seventy countries.

Microsoft 365 has more than 430 million users worldwide. Many companies, organisations and consumers rely on it for email, video meetings and office work. The AI assistant Copilot was also affected, and staff working from home could not always log in remotely.

In the Netherlands, most problem reports came in around 09.00 on Friday, at the start of the working day. They fell sharply from early afternoon.

Microsoft said it has completed its work on the underlying problem and restored service to the remaining affected customers and regions. Customers using Outlook, Teams and Copilot should no longer have problems, the company said. It is still monitoring the backlog of email messages that built up during the outage.

Microsoft described the cause as "a technical problem that has nothing to do with cyberattacks or AI". It was not a hack, the company said, but a problem with servers. Microsoft apologised for the outage on Friday. The exact cause has not yet been made public.