What we know about the global Microsoft outage

A major global Microsoft outage has caused problems, or in some cases disabled entire services. including emails and artificial intelligence products. Reports of problems with the email provider Outlook peaked globally at nearly 140,000 around 18:00 GMT on Thursday, according to monitoring website Downdetector.

Microsoft has said the outage was not caused by a cyber-security incident, but efforts to fix the issues have so far been largely unsuccessful. Microsoft 365 Services, including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft's artificial intelligence software Copilot, have been affected by "connectivity problems". While customers are reporting varying levels of access - many have not been able to send or receive emails, view certain files or details on their calendar apps.

The full scale of the outage has not been confirmed, but monitoring website Downdetector had 140,000 people from 74 countries report issues with Outlook on Thursday evening.