Tech expert Mark Gregory, an associate professor at RMIT, has been on ABC News Breakfast this morning helping us make sense of the outage.
Here's what he reckons led up to this situation:
"Microsoft announced that they were doing updates a few days ago and as part of the update process there's likely been a misconfiguration either in what we call BGP — which was the problem that Optus had — or another network configuration problem.
"Part of the server pool that serves the Outlook service appears to have fallen off the network.
"As we know in the Cloud, because there are so many users, possibly millions of users of Outlook, that they have many different servers spread across the world that serve the users.
"They need to configure and manage all of those servers
"It appears 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."
Here are the services listed as "potentially impacted" by Microsoft:
The company has been giving updates on Microsoft's Service Health Status website.
Earlier, it said the outage was linked to " a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable , which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure".
We're not exactly sure why those servers are unavailable, but Microsoft's team is working on it.
Here's what the company said in its latest update a few minutes ago.
"While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them.
"We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service.
"We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests."
AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic confirmed they've been affected by the widespread Microsoft outage.
ChatGPT creator, OpenAI, said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors because tools were not working as expected.
Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
Microsoft says it's working to mitigate the outage and is restarting the affected servers.
Good morning. Thanks for joining us today.
If you're one of the many people having troubles accessing your Outlook emails this morning, you're not alone!
Microsoft, the company behind the email platform many people around the world rely on, is having a major outage at the moment.
Microsoft confirmed the outage was affecting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other platforms.
"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," the company said.
"We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service."
Buckle up. We'll bring you more updates as they come to hand.
