Microsoft outage: What’s causing the delay, and could emails be lost?

Microsoft says Teams, Outlook and Copilot are recovering after a technical fault caused a global outage of more than 20 hours that hit schools, hospitals, courts and governments.

Microsoft says its services are recovering after an outage of more than 20 hours disrupted schools, healthcare systems, businesses, courts and governments worldwide, the BBC reports.

Teams, Outlook and AI tool Copilot were affected, with many users unable to send or receive emails from late Thursday.

The company blamed “elevated load” on its infrastructure, linked to an issue during a network capacity upgrade, and said it was not a cyber-security incident.

It extended the email “timeout window” to 48 hours to protect delayed messages.

“The trouble is that this kind of failure snowballs,” said Prof James Ferryman of the University of Reading.

“You can’t just turn it all back on at once. You have to bring it back bit by bit,” he added.

Microsoft said it was “deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners.”

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, though the full scale of the outage has not been confirmed.