Microsoft’s global outage stretched past 12 hours on Friday, taking down Outlook, Teams and Copilot for millions of workers and leaving several Malaysian banks unable to answer email enquiries on time. The company said it had seen “marginal success” in restoring services, without giving a timeline for full recovery, CNN reported.
The outage began on Thursday and spread beyond the Americas within an hour. In its latest updates, Microsoft said its traffic optimisation actions had produced “positive results for service stability and increased capacity”, and that patches applied during infrastructure reboots were working as intended.
Charles Lamanna, the company’s executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, said there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity”. Microsoft has blamed servers that failed automated health checks and became unavailable, and said it will publish a post-incident report once the outage is mitigated.
In Malaysia, Maybank, RHB, CIMB, AmBank, Bank Muamalat and Affin Bank told customers that replies to email enquiries may be delayed, according to The Star. Maybank said digital banking, ATMs, self-service terminals and branches were still running, and urged customers to use those channels instead.
The National Cyber Security Agency said the outage was more likely the result of technical or infrastructure issues than a cyberattack. Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke drew a comparison with the 2024 CrowdStrike software glitch, telling a Sydney press conference that Microsoft believed it was dealing with an update that had gone awry.
Outage reports reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour, according to Downdetector, which tracked close to three in 10 reports from outside the United States between 1700 and 1855 UTC. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, and more than 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use Copilot, according to the company.
The fallout reached US city governments in Miami Beach, Austin and Jacksonville, which asked residents to call instead of emailing. Baltimore County said staff could not send or receive messages, while the Arapahoe Sheriff’s Office in Colorado said the outage had delayed bond payments for prisoners.
Airlines in India were also hit. IndiGo said its email support service was down and pointed passengers to its website and app, while Akasa Air reported delays. Neither carrier reported problems with flights, and Air India said it had rerouted its email traffic.
Banks in Singapore and Australia warned customers to watch for phishing attempts that exploit the outage. Standard Chartered Singapore said “a technology outage can create opportunities for scammers”, while ING Australia told customers not to give anyone access to their devices without confirming the caller through a publicly listed number.
In Detroit, electric vehicle maker Workhorse Group pushed its quarterly earnings call from Thursday to Monday, citing the outage. Microsoft has not said when every service will be back to normal.
