American software giant Microsoft said Thursday that measures taken to resolve a global Outlook email outage, which has lasted since Thursday evening, were “not working as expected,” and that it was working to find alternative solutions.
“We have monitored the status of the changes applied to improve the maintainability of the service and confirmed that they are not producing the expected effects. We are identifying alternative lines of work that can be implemented to increase capacity in the face of persistent imbalances in traffic management,” Microsoft said in a message published on the X platform. This disruption prevents tens of thousands of users around the world from accessing their emails.
Hundreds of reports in Switzerland
Since Thursday evening, tens of thousands of users have been unable to access their emails. The American group first indicated that it was investigating reports of outages “in the Americas”, then specified that it had “confirmed that the problem could affect the connection to the Microsoft 365 service for all users in any region” of the world.
According to outage tracking site Downdetector, the outage affected Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, across the Americas, as well as parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.
Disturbances persisted again on Friday morning. Around 7:30 a.m., more than 340 people in Switzerland reported problems with Microsoft Outlook on the allestörungen.ch platform. Most users were experiencing connection difficulties. More than 185 outage reports were also recorded for Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 is a service that includes applications such as Outlook and Teams. The outage also disrupts certain functions of artificial intelligence (AI) assistants which connect to Microsoft accounts to read emails or consult the calendar.
Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT assigned
In addition to Copilot (Microsoft’s AI assistant), Claude and ChatGPT were also affected: Anthropic and OpenAI, which develop them, reported that their AI assistants were no longer able to access Microsoft 365 services.
The outage also disrupts communications for many public services. Thus, deprived of electronic and voice messaging, the University of Iowa hospital network had to ask its patients to use its online portal to contact their caregivers.
