Microsoft outage hits companies and governments worldwide as it struggles to restore services

HONG KONG (AP) — From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled with fixing the issue.Microsoft said in an update Friday that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”More than 130,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook earlier on