⚠️ALERT: A GLOBAL Microsoft outage has knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot across 74 countries, hitting software used by 450 MILLION work accounts. It has dragged on for more than 5 hours, and Microsoft has not confirmed the cause. At the centre of it is something most of us never think about, but rely on every day. Exchange Online, the system that delivers Outlook email for businesses, began failing around midday Eastern time on Thursday. By 1:25 PM, problem reports had jumped from fewer than 15 a minute to 19,650. Outlook reports alone ran 2,000 times above normal. A US state government and two hospital systems in Michigan lost access to email. It even reached ChatGPT and Claude, whose makers said their Microsoft connections were affected. Reports spiked for Amazon’s AWS too, until Amazon said it was “operating normally” and called the outage reports “inaccurate.” Microsoft says a number of its servers became “unexpectedly unavailable.” It paused all deployments and began restarting them. Hours later, it said its fixes “have not provided the anticipated relief.” Even Defender, the platform companies rely on to detect cyberattacks, is caught in the outage. Earlier the same day, Teams had already gone down for over an hour in North America. Microsoft has not said whether the two are linked, and it has not pointed to an attack. Reports have eased from a peak near 130,000 to about 37,000 as some servers return, but Microsoft has not declared it fixed or said how many customers were cut off.