Microsoft 365 outage enters second day in Canada, worldwide

Microsoft’s outage affecting Outlook, Teams and the Copilot assistant ran into a second day on Friday, with the company saying fixes it applied were “not taking as expected” and that it has no indication of malicious activity.

In an update Friday, Microsoft said the problem affects a wide range of Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online and email, and that it is using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure,” the Associated Press reported. The company later said it was seeing “early stabilization and capacity improvements” as recovery continued. It did not say when all services would be restored.

In Canada, Unity Health Toronto, a network that runs several hospitals in the city, declared a code grey, which signals an infrastructure failure, CBC News reported. The network said its teams were having trouble sending and receiving email but that patient and resident care was not affected.

The outage has reached well beyond Canada. Japan’s deputy chief cabinet secretary said it hit government IT systems, the Philippines’ Supreme Court said some operations were affected, and Singapore’s government technology agency said government email was down. Australia’s home affairs minister said Microsoft told him it does not believe it is dealing with a cyberattack. Downdetector recorded about 130,000 reports of Outlook problems on Thursday, a peak since eased, according to the AP.

Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its 365 apps. OpenAI and Anthropic each reported trouble connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, the AP said.

We first reported the disruption on Thursday in Outlook outage hits Microsoft 365 users in Canada, U.S. The outage came during a volatile week for technology stocks, which we covered in our TSX close report. Reporting for this story is from The Associated Press via The Canadian Press and CBC News.

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