Global disruption of Microsoft service affected Asia-Pacific

A global disruption of Microsoft services such as Outlook, Teams and Copilot stretched into Asia-Pacific business hours on Friday after affecting thousands of US users as the tech giant struggled to fix server problems it blamed for the outage.

Microsoft said it had applied adjustments to the affected servers, but they did not result in sustained recovery. It said it had observed some partial recovery in the regions where it applied the adjustments.

"We're reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability," the company said on X.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed more than 18,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at 11:30pm ET.

It also showed outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including Hong Kong, India, Australia and Japan, early Friday local time.

At its peak, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US around 1pm ET on Thursday.

In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 services that depended on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional.

Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.

Australia's Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, said Microsoft told him it was "not aware" of any malicious activity that was causing the outage.

Australian Home Affairs Minister TONY BURKE: "I've spoken this morning shortly before the media conference to get the latest briefing from both Lieutenant General Michelle McGuinness, the Cyber Security Coordinator and following that, Jane Livesey from Microsoft in Australia. The perspective of Microsoft at this stage, they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event, they don't believe they are dealing with a cyber attack. They believe that they are dealing, in some ways, similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry. Secondly, in terms of the impact so far, the impact that they are dealing with very much, is very much on email systems. One of the things that we had with CrowdStrike was we then had a whole lot of downstream impacts, where it was affected the capability of a whole range of other products quite separate from that. So that's the latest information that we have and I just wanted to be able to provide you with that."