Microsoft 'not aware' of malicious activity as it scrambles to solve global outage

Microsoft has said it is not aware of any malicious activity causing a global outage.

In the last few hours, Microsoft 365 Services, including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft’s artificial intelligence software Copilot, have been affected by issues.

Microsoft said recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure.

”We are seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced,” Microsoft said.

”Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. Engineering teams are cycling affected infrastructure through traffic drain, restart, remediation and staged return-to-service while monitoring closely.

“We are also evaluating additional mitigation options to improve recovery speed and consistency.”

‘Not malicious’

Microsoft has also stressed that the outage was not caused by a cyber security incident.

”At this time, we are not aware of any malicious activity causing this incident,” it added.

”We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation and we will share a full post-incident report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after recovery is complete.”

Losses for the insurance industry can be large following outages. For example, in October 2025, CyberCube estimated that losses for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage would range from £28.5m ($38m) to £436m ($581m).

And in 2024, global insured losses of up to $1.5bn (£1.16bn) were estimated following a faulty software update that affected Windows hosts. Cyber security firm Crowdstrike, which rolled out the update, said that around 8.5 million Windows devices were impacted.