Microsoft: further issues with Teams, Outlook and Copilot in 74 countries. Malicious intent ruled out

In a message posted on X, Microsoft has stated that the measures put in place since yesterday evening to resolve the global issues affecting Outlook are not going ‘as planned’ and that it is considering alternative solutions. ‘We have been monitoring the status of the changes made to improve the service’s functionality and have found that they are not producing the desired results. We are identifying alternative approaches to increase capacity in the face of persistent imbalances in traffic management.’

Problems are being experienced in various parts of the world with Microsoft services, including the Outlook email system. The company confirmed this on its social media accounts, following numerous reports of service disruptions from users. ‘Whilst we are working to minimise the impact,’ the message reads, ‘we can confirm that the issue may affect connectivity to Microsoft 365 services for users in any geographical area.’

The company has also announced that the serious disruption affecting several Microsoft 365 services worldwide was not caused by malicious activity. This was stated by an executive at the US tech giant.

“We regret that today’s (Thursday 12 November, ed.) disruptions have caused inconvenience to our customers, and we are working to resolve the issue... At present, I can confirm that there is no evidence to suggest that what happened was due to malicious activity or a cyberattack,” wrote Charles Lamanna, a Microsoft executive responsible for Copilot, Agents and Platform, on social media platform X.

According to the Downdetector website, the outages – which affected Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other business services – spread to at least 74 countries and territories within the space of about an hour.