Microsoft outage: Word 365, Outlook, Teams unavailable in Bangladesh

Microsoft has been hit by a major technical outage worldwide since 11:32 pm on Thursday (Bangladesh time).

The outage, which has lasted more than 14 hours, has left millions of people across the world, including Bangladesh, unable to use Microsoft's email service Outlook, video conferencing software Microsoft Teams and Word 365 online. As a result, various organisations are facing major disruptions.

Users of Outlook email services at several corporate organisations in Bangladesh have been unable to access the service since morning.

Mostafizur Rahman, an official at a research organisation who did not wish to disclose the name of his institution, said, “We have been unable to use Microsoft Outlook since last night. Although our office is closed today, Friday, all our work online has come to a halt.”

According to Downdetector, a website that monitors website outages, major disruptions to Microsoft services had spread to 74 countries within approximately an hour of the worldwide outage beginning. Various Microsoft services are still unavailable worldwide.

News agency Reuters reports: A disruption of Microsoft services such as Outlook, Teams and Copilot stretched into Asia-Pacific business hours on Friday after affecting thousands of US users, as the tech giant struggled to fix server problems it blamed for the outage.

The outage hit government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. It is the second disruption to Microsoft's 365 services this year, raising concerns that repeated failures could push corporate clients to question Microsoft's reliability.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number ⁠of sources, showed more than 18,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at 11:30 p.m. ET (0430 GMT). It also showed outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan, early Friday local time.

At its peak, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US around 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. The outage has lasted for about 12 hours.

In a service health notice, Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 services that depended on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements that did not rely on Exchange Online remained functional. Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.

US AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic said they had faced issues with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were impacted.

Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year ⁠and also in October last year.

The tech giant last month also reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide, according to Reuters.