Microsoft Outlook Outage Spread From the US to Singapore
Microsoft's Outlook, Teams and wider Microsoft 365 suite went down for tens of thousands of users across the world, and the failure was still being worked through when Singapore opened for business.
The disruption began in the Americas, where Microsoft first reported problems with Teams in North America, then widened the notice to say the issue could affect service connectivity in any region.
And the size of it shows in the tracker figures. Reports of Outlook problems on Downdetector peaked at 138,058 around lunchtime on the American east coast and had fallen to about 34,490 by the evening, while complaints about Microsoft 365 dropped below 13,000 and Teams to fewer than 800.
Singapore felt it the next morning. Downdetector logged 250 reports for Outlook at 7.05 in the morning and 152 for Microsoft 365, and the Outlook figure more than doubled to 535 by 7.55, with about 40 per cent of them about the app itself, a quarter about receiving messages and the rest about logging in.
The cause Microsoft described was capacity rather than demand. A number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which strained the rest, and the company said a core process on the affected machines was becoming overwhelmed so that they stopped responding, not that traffic had risen.
But the fix is the one every administrator knows. Microsoft paused deployments, moved traffic off the affected infrastructure, restarted servers and rolled out an alternative health check to bring machines back, and warned that recovery would be gradual as clients reconnected.
The outage reached past Microsoft's own products. OpenAI said new connections through its Microsoft connectors might be broken and tools were not working as expected, and Anthropic said an issue with an upstream provider was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector, which is the quiet dependency that turns an email failure into an AI failure.
Businesses outside software felt it too. Workhorse Group, an electric truck maker due to report quarterly results the same day, moved its announcement to next week citing disruption from the outage, which is a small illustration of how much ordinary corporate scheduling runs through one vendor's mail servers.
So Microsoft restarted the servers, service came back gradually, and the trigger is still unnamed.
Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 were disrupted worldwide on Thursday and into Friday
Downdetector logged a peak of 138,058 Outlook reports before the figure fell
Singapore recorded 250 Outlook reports at 7.05am, rising to 535 by 7.55am
Microsoft blamed servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable rather than a traffic spike
OpenAI and Anthropic both reported broken Microsoft connector issues
