Microsoft 365 users continued to experience widespread connectivity problems as a major service disruption stretched towards the 12-hour mark, affecting access to Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams and other Microsoft services across multiple regions. Despite several recovery measures, Microsoft said its efforts to restore normal service were not progressing as expected, with unexpectedly unavailable servers emerging as the main cause of the disruption. In its latest update on the US social media platform X, Microsoft 365 Status said it had monitored the impact of changes introduced to improve serviceability but confirmed that they were not delivering the expected results. "We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," the company said. Read: Setback for Google as EU Court adviser backs $1.7b antitrust fine Microsoft clarified in an earlier update that the elevated infrastructure load was not the result of unusually high user traffic. Instead, a number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure. The disruption has affected access to Exchange Online mailboxes, while users have also reported connectivity issues with Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams through various access methods. The first reports of the outage emerged at 11:17am ET (9:17pm PKT) on Thursday, with Downdetector recording more than 97,000 reports of Outlook problems, over 38,000 complaints involving Microsoft 365 and approximately 4,500 reports related to Teams in the United States. At its peak, Downdetector showed more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US around 1pm ET (11pm PKT) 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. The company added that it was "not aware" of any malicious activity that was causing the outage. Impact on email systems Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said that ​Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack. "They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone ​awry," Burke said at a press conference. "The impact that they are dealing with ... is very much on email systems," the minister added. Australia's spy agency and federal police were among organisations caught up in the outage on Friday. The ‌CrowdStrike malfunction ⁠of 2024 was one of the largest internet disruptions, hobbling technology systems in hospitals, banks, and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies. The US House of Representatives said the outage impacted its users, and its engineers were working with Microsoft. Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that the outage was affecting the government’s information system infrastructure. Businesses feel the impact US AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic said they had faced issues with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were impacted. The outage also disrupted fund management at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers, and ​investment trust companies. One of the companies went ​as far as cancelling a bond repurchase ⁠agreement transaction it had already scheduled, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters, declining to provide the name of the company. Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely look past the outage but that repeated disruptions could hurt Microsoft over time. "I think investors will ​take this in their stride for now, because very few of these customers can realistically walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight," Gilbert ​said. Read more: Trump's AI task force met Thursday, discussed AI-powered cyberattacks "The bigger worry is that ⁠this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and if reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands. The market will want to see Microsoft prove it can keep the lights on before it asks customers to spend more on Copilot." Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year ⁠and also ​in October last year. Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a ​range of industries worldwide. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on November 12, rescheduled it to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.