Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams were disrupted for about 10 hours on Thursday as the tech giant struggled to fix issues with some servers, hitting businesses and government agencies globally that use the popular platforms.

In its latest update, Microsoft said efforts to improve serviceability were not progressing as expected.

"We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," it said.

Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, showed more than 25,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at 9.30pm EST, or 10.30am local time. It also showed outages for several Microsoft services in the Asia-Pacific region, including India, Australia and Japan.

At its peak, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US around 1pm EST on Thursday.

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. (Reuters)


Edited by Aaron Tam