Microsoft said unusually heavy load on infrastructure in several regions was likely contributing to connection problems during a disruption affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot.
The outage affected users relying on Microsoft 365 for email and other services. Downdetector reported that Microsoft products were affected in 74 countries and territories within an hour. Companies and government offices were among those reporting communication problems.
Microsoft said it was not aware of malicious activity causing the incident and would continue treating the response as a priority. The company said changes already made to improve service reliability were not working as expected, and it was seeking other ways to add capacity.
New Zealand’s Foreign Ministry said the disruption was affecting email receipt at its overseas diplomatic posts, including embassies, consulates and representative offices.
Microsoft later said it was seeing limited recovery while looking for ways to route user traffic away from affected servers. It said access could return gradually as capacity came back, but gave no timeline for full restoration.
