The global outage affecting Microsoft services continued Friday morning after beginning Thursday evening and causing widespread disruptions to email and other systems operated by the technology giant.
In Israel, the financial news outlet Globes said the outage was also affecting its website and app, neither of which was being updated.
In a notice to readers, the Globes editorial team said, "An update for our readers: Globes is experiencing disruptions due to the widespread Microsoft outage. The website and app are not being updated at this time. The issue is being addressed, and we will provide an update when normal operations resume."
The outage began Thursday evening with the Outlook email service, as many users worldwide reported difficulties accessing their inboxes, sending messages and accessing online calendars.
Downdetector, which collects reports of outages affecting online services, recorded more than 130,000 user reports at the peak of the disruption.
Alongside Outlook, disruptions were also reported in Teams and Microsoft 365 due to connectivity problems in the company's infrastructure. According to reports, the disruptions also affected users of artificial intelligence services provided by OpenAI and Anthropic.
Microsoft initially said teams working on the outage were seeing positive signs of progress, but the company later acknowledged that efforts to resolve the issue were not progressing as expected.
According to the company's statement, the problem stems from increased load on its infrastructure in several regions, affecting its ability to provide services normally.
Earlier, Microsoft announced that it had resolved an issue with Teams affecting users in North America. It later reported difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas, but clarified that the disruptions could affect Microsoft 365 users worldwide.
The Outlook outage was reported to have been resolved Thursday evening after about an hour, but updates overnight and Friday morning indicated that the wider disruptions to Microsoft's systems had not yet ended.