Microsoft Meltdown: Global Friday 13th outage hits millions as fix attempts 'not going as expected'

A worldwide Microsoft outage has left businesses, government services, and individuals unable to access services, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot.

The blackout has now dragged on for over 14 hours as the company struggles to fix the issue.

Microsoft, in an update, said it had noticed a "partial recovery" in some regions, but its actions were failing to result in a "sustained recovery".

The company later added that it is "engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact".

At 3.13am, the US-based company - worth a staggering $3.8 TRILLION - said the changes it had made to "improve serviceability" were not "taking as expected".

A patch rolled out just before 8am also failed to work.

Charles Lamanna, an executive at the fourth-biggest company in the world, said he could confirm the outage is not "the result of malicious or cyber activity".

In a service health notice, Microsoft said services which rely on Exchange Online and email were affected. Exchange Online is the company's cloud-based messaging platform that delivers email, calendar, contacts, and tasks.

Australia's Home Affairs and Cybersecurity Minister Tony Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft officials who "do not believe they are dealing with a cyber hack event".

He said the outage was similar to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, when an update-gone-wrong grounded flights, left companies unable to accept payments, and cut a Sky News broadcast.

"One of the things that we had with CrowdStrike was we then had a whole lot of downstream impacts where it was affected the capability of a whole range of other products," he said.

Artificial intelligence giant OpenAI said some tools connected to Microsoft were not working as expected as a result of the outage.

And AI rival Anthropic also said it was suffering problems.

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Downdetector, an internet monitoring website, said 74 countries reported problems with Microsoft services in one hour, with direct reports to the website peaking at nearly 140,000 around 6pm on Thursday.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 services, while between three and four million businesses rely on it.

This includes governments worldwide.

Services NSW, which provides a range of Government services in Australia's state of New South Wales, urged visitors to delay their in-person visits and complete transactions online where possible.

Singapore's Government confirmed the outage had affected some of its systems but "emergency services remain fully operational".

The US House of Representatives also said its users were experiencing problems and its engineers were now liaising with Microsoft.

If the outage hits 24 hours, it could be the "most severe technology outage in history" and impact billions of dollars in operations, New Zealand-based tech analyst Paul Spain told the BBC.

The 2024 CrowdStrike outage cost Fortune 500 businesses an estimated £5.4billion.

More than 5,000 flights worldwide were grounded as a result of the technical disruption, leaving hundreds of British holidaymakers frustrated.

Hundreds of Britons were then left stuck in queues for the ferry crossing at Dover as they sought alternative ways to travel.