Residents and businesses across the UAE struggled to send emails, access mailboxes and retrieve documents as a global Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook and other services.
Disruptions to Microsoft services such as Outlook and Teams began on Thursday as the company struggled to resolve server problems, affecting businesses and government agencies worldwide.
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Yasser Ahmad, a long-time UAE resident, said he could not send emails or access his mailbox despite several attempts.
“Important emails, business correspondence and follow-ups have been delayed, affecting productivity and making it difficult to carry out daily responsibilities smoothly,” he said. “This disruption has caused considerable inconvenience, particularly when timely communication is essential for both professional and personal matters.”
He added that he hoped the issue would be resolved soon so that normal email activity could resume.
Dheeraj Thakur, a communications executive, said the disruption had caused temporary communication challenges for businesses globally, but operations had largely continued as normal.
“Our team adapted to alternative communication channels to minimise any inconvenience,” he said. “We expect normal services to resume shortly.”
Schools, students affected
Aiza Khan, an IT student in Dubai, said Microsoft Word stopped responding while she was editing a document in class on Friday morning.
“The software repeatedly told me to reload the page, but even after several attempts, it wasn’t working,” she said.
When she tried to recover the file through OneDrive, she was taken to an error page each time. The problem began at around 10.30am, she said, adding that the service was now working again, albeit slowly.
Al Sadiq Islamic English School warned parents that email communication might be temporarily affected by what it described as a global Microsoft service disruption.
“Due to a global Microsoft service disruption, our school email communication may be temporarily affected. If you are unable to reach us by email and your matter is urgent, please try to contact us via our school landline and we will support as much as we can,” it said in a statement sent to parents on Friday morning.
Global impact
Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the United States at the peak of the outage. Microsoft said features of Microsoft 365 that relied on Exchange Online and email were affected, while elements that did not depend on Exchange Online remained functional.
The outage also affected connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services. Workhorse Group postponed the release of its third-quarter results from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruption caused by the outage. Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among the organisations affected, while the US House of Representatives said its users had also been impacted.
Microsoft said the servers it had restored remained stable and that it was shifting traffic to alternative routes where possible while bringing the remaining servers back online.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” the company said.
Microsoft reported a separate outage of its Azure cloud platform last month, which affected its productivity software and industries worldwide.
Source: Khaleej Times