Microsoft has been hit with a widespread global outage as users face disruptions across its online services including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and Copilot.

Outage-monitoring website Downdetector recorded a sharp spike in reports about 4.30am AEST, with more than 120,000 users reporting problems with accessing email platform Outlook.

The tech giant confirmed users may be locked out of a suite of Microsoft services including Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, AI chatbot Copilot 365, Defender XDR, Planner, To Do, In Tune and Purview and Power BI.

In a statement posted to its Service Health Status site, Microsoft said it was working “aggressively” to restore access to the impacted platforms.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we’ve paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event,” Microsoft said.

“We’ve determined that the elevated load isn’t driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure.

“We’re investigating what’s causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.”

In its most recent update, Microsoft said the company had “begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they’re remaining stable so far.

“We’ve also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.

“We’ve streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service.

“To further support recovery, we’re implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we’ll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results.

“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.”

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke on Friday said the global tech firm had briefed him that it was “not a cyber incident” and that it seemed to have steamed from an update issue.

He said the incident had been likened to the CrowdStrike global IT outage in 2024 which caused an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows computers to crash and display what was dubbed as “the Blue Screen of Death”.

“The perspective of Microsoft at this stage: they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event,” Mr Burke said.

Mr Burke said he had received briefings on Friday morning from Microsoft Australia and New Zealand president Jane Livesey and Australia’s National Cyber Security Coordinator Lieutenant General Michelle Michelle McGuinness.

“They believe that they are dealing, in some ways, similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry,” Mr Burke said on Friday.

“In terms of the impact so far, the impact that they are dealing with very much is very much on email systems.

Meanwhile OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.

Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

RMIT associate professor Mark Gregory said there had likely been a “misconfiguration” during a routine Microsoft update process similar to the one Optus had when it experienced a mass outage in September 2025.

“Part of the server pool that serves the Outlook service appears to have fallen off the network … it appears that a large number of them have essentially been dropped off the list of available servers and so what’s left can’t serve all the traffic,” Professor Gregory told ABC News Breakfast.

“It means absolute chaos from a user point of view because while it may be early morning here, somewhere in the world it’s the middle of the day and people are trying to work. If all of a sudden you’ve lost access to Outlook, you can’t do your emails and you’ve lost productivity.”

DOWNLOAD THE NIGHTLY APP