Microsoft rules out cyber-attack as global outage disrupts services: what we know

Services hit by disruption

Microsoft said its 365 services, including Teams, Outlook and Copilot, were experiencing connectivity problems. Some users, however, were still able to use Teams messaging and online meetings without issues.

Microsoft’s website says more than 430 million people use its 365 apps. The actual number affected may be higher than Downdetector reports, since the service relies mainly on users reporting problems themselves.

OpenAI and Anthropic also reported outage-related problems. Government agencies and services, including Singapore’s government and Australia’s spy agency, said they were affected.

Microsoft explains the cause

Microsoft attributed the continuing outage to elevated load on its infrastructure and ruled out a cyber-attack. The company said many servers became unexpectedly unavailable, sending additional traffic to the remaining servers and putting them under strain. In an earlier update, Microsoft said its efforts to fix the problem were not going as expected.

Potential wider consequences

Australian cyber-security expert Troy Hunt told the BBC that the outage could have far-reaching effects. He said it could disrupt people’s work as well as their ability to communicate about appointments, make purchases requiring verification, and create or access accounts and services.