Global Microsoft outage leaves Dutch users without email

Microsoft software, which includes widely used email and communication tools like Outlook and Teams, has been hit by a global outage since Thursday evening. The company says it has nothing to do with a cybersecurity breach.

Hundreds of millions of people use the affected apps daily for their work, making this potentially the “most severe technology outage in history”, a tech analyst told the BBC.

Dutch users of Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 were still impacted on Friday morning. By around 8.15am, Dutch outage tracker allestoringen.nl had logged almost 2,800 complaints about Outlook, nearly 700 about Microsoft 365 and just over 200 about Teams.

The University of Twente warned of disruption, and regional broadcasters Omroep Flevoland and RTV Utrecht said they were having trouble receiving email, according to ANP.

Microsoft said that the outage was caused by an “increased load” on infrastructure, with a number of servers unexpectedly offline, but no question of a cyberattack, the company wrote on social media. By 8.45am Dutch time, Microsoft wrote that it was seeing “positive results” but disruptions continue.

With 430 million global users of Microsoft 365 software alone, the BBC analyst said the outage could well cause billions of dollars in losses.