Microsoft outage updates: Outlook, Teams down for millions as UAE users report disruption

Microsoft said on Thursday that efforts to repair a major outage of Outlook were not going as expected and the firm was seeking alternative solutions as users around the world were left without its crucial services. 

The hours-long disruption, which Microsoft attributed to "elevated load" on its infrastructure, has hit email as well as products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.

The impact of the outage has been felt globally, with users ranging from companies to governments reporting that they were unable to communicate via Outlook.  

Microsoft has reported only “limited recovery” so far, warning that services will return gradually as users’ apps reconnect. It has paused deployments, moved traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarted servers as engineers work on alternative fixes.

The outage has exposed how heavily businesses depend on cloud services. In an opinion piece for Gulf News, Anoop Paudval, Head of Information Security GRC at Gulf News, argues that cloud availability is not the same as business resilience, and urges companies to plan for outages with backup communication, offline continuity and regular outage drills. Read more: O365 to O364: The day the world’s business lost a working day

Microsoft has blamed connectivity errors in part of its Exchange Online infrastructure, the system behind Outlook email, along with elevated load across multiple regions. The company first said the issue was limited to the Americas, but later warned it could affect users “in any region”. Read our explainer: Microsoft outage explained: What went wrong with Outlook and Teams, and how it is hitting UAE users

Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams were the three most reported services on Downdetector’s UAE site on Friday morning, with sharp spikes in complaints, showing that the disruption that began on Thursday was still affecting users across the country.