Major outage hits Microsoft Outlook

A global Microsoft outage has disrupted Outlook email and other Microsoft 365 services across 74 countries and territories, affecting businesses, government agencies and millions of users. The disruption, which began on Thursday afternoon, has affected airlines, financial institutions, educational institutions and public services, including visa processing in New Zealand.

Microsoft said the outage was not caused by malicious activity or a security breach, adding that it had made progress in restoring services. The company reported improvements in server stability after applying a software patch and began extending the fix to additional servers, while outage reports on Downdetector showed signs of decline.