Microsoft outage explained: what went wrong and is your data at risk?

A failure in part of Microsoft’s server infrastructure has cut people off from Outlook email, Teams and other everyday office tools for more than a day, with problems reported in 74 countries and territories.The disruption began on Thursday afternoon European time and was still not fully fixed on Friday morning. Microsoft says there is no sign of a cyber attack, but it has yet to name a root cause.Here is what we know so far.What has happened since Thursday?Euronews reported how the outage first hit Outlook, Teams and Copilot on Thursday evening. Since then, the picture has got worse rather than better.Microsoft's fixes have not solved the issue. Servers it brought back overnight crashed again once traffic returned, and the company admitted its changes were "not taking as expected". By Friday morning, it reported only "marginal success".Reports to Downdetector, a website that tracks outages using reports from the public, registered nearly 140,000 issues on Outlook alone.The list of affected services has also grown. Microsoft's incident notice now includes SharePoint Online, used for sharing documents, and the security tool Defender XDR. The task-management apps Planner and To Do have also been reported down.How many people have been affected?The true number is unknown.