Microsoft outage hits Lancashire businesses and schools as Outlook and Teams suffer disruption
A Lancashire school has warned parents and pupils about email disruption as Microsoft works to restore services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot.
Businesses and schools in Lancashire that rely on Microsoft services are continuing to experience disruption today (Friday, November 13) as the tech giant works to resolve the outage impacting some of its most popular services, including Outlook email services.
Fleetwood High School alerted parents and pupils that the outage was affecting email communication at the school this morning, advising anyone needing an urgent reply to contact the school office.
Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at around 6.15pm on Thursday.
Issues were still being reported at 3am the following morning.
Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outage did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.
“We regret that today’s outage caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” he wrote on X.
“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”
Affected products included instant messaging service Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of its Cloud services, among others.
In an update on Friday, the tech giant said that although it had managed to get servers operating multiple times overnight UK time, those servers had crashed.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported issues.
“We’re investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected,” OpenAI said in a statement on its website.
“We’ll share an update when we know more.”
Microsoft said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said.
The tech firm provided regular updates on official Microsoft 365 accounts.
It had earlier directed people to a page on its website for updates, but users complained the page did not load.
Multiple governments around the world also reported Microsoft outage, including in Australia, India and Japan.