Microsoft has issued a formal apology following a widespread outage that left Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 apps inaccessible for approximately 24 hours. The disruption began early Friday morning and affected users globally, including Australian businesses and government agencies such as Service NSW, NSW Parliament, and Queensland Health.
As of Saturday morning, Microsoft reported that services have largely recovered, though Outlook remains down for Australian users. The company attributed the outage to server failures that overloaded remaining systems, ruling out cyberattacks or a surge in user traffic as causes. Delayed emails are being held for 48 hours to ensure delivery.
The outage timeline revealed a series of setbacks, with Microsoft initially struggling to restore services. By 6:44 PM on Friday, the company reported positive results from traffic changes, but full recovery remained elusive. By 2:39 AM Saturday, recovery was spreading, though Microsoft acknowledged ongoing issues in the Asia Pacific region.
This incident marks the third major disruption to Microsoft 365 this year, following similar outages in January and August. Microsoft has promised a full report on the cause of the outage, expressing deep regret for the impact on its customers.