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A major outage of Microsoft services globally has caused issues and, in some cases, the disabling of entire services, including email and artificial intelligence products.
The number of reports of problems with email provider Outlook reached a global peak of almost 140,000 around 1800 GMT on Thursday, according to monitoring site Downdetector.
Microsoft said the outage was not due to a cybersecurity incident, but efforts to resolve the issues have so far been largely unsuccessful.
Here's what we know about the affected services and what went wrong.
Which services are affected?
Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft's Copilot artificial intelligence software, have been affected by "connectivity issues."
The full extent of the outage has not yet been confirmed, but monitoring website Downdetector recorded 140,000 reports of problems with Outlook from 74 countries as of Thursday evening.
According to the Microsoft website, more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps.
This software is also used by businesses around the world and is expected to have a ripple effect on other services.
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While customers report varying levels of access, many have been unable to send or receive emails, or view certain files or details on their calendar apps.
Some users have been able to use Teams normally and are using the messaging and online meeting features as usual.
How many people were affected?
Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic both reported issues following the outage.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft services, which prevented some tools from working as expected.
Government agencies and departments, including the Singaporean government and Australian intelligence services, also reported being affected.
Several GP practices in the UK have warned of possible problems, with some advising their patients to ask their urgent questions by telephone rather than by email or online form.
What went wrong?
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Microsoft has ruled out a cyberattack and attributed the current outage to a “high load” on its infrastructure.
This term refers to a situation where servers are under much greater load than usual.
In the case of the outage at Microsoft, a large number of servers became "unexpectedly unavailable," the company said, which caused additional traffic to the remaining servers, putting a strain on them.
On Friday morning, Microsoft said it had seen "marginal success" in its efforts to resolve the incident.
In its latest update, the company said it continues to monitor activity across all regions to assess server health and determine what steps it can take to improve capacity.
In a previous statement, the tech giant said its attempts to fix it "did not work as expected."
What did the experts say?
Australian cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt told the BBC the outage could have significant consequences.
“Microsoft is a vital part of the Internet's infrastructure and reminds us how crucial email remains. »
“This outage not only affects many people's ability to work, but also their ability to communicate about appointments, purchase things requiring verification, create or access accounts and services,” he said.
Paul Spain, of New Zealand consultancy Gorilla Technology, said that with email and offline services, businesses have virtually "lost a day's work", which is "frustrating" for users.
We used AI to help translate this article, originally written in English. A BBC journalist checked the translation before publication. Learn more about how we use AI.
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