Just a day after being called out by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for questionable Microsoft 365 practices, Microsoft is now grappling with a major global outage affecting millions of users.

The disruption, which hit only days after a massive Amazon Web Services (AWS) failure, has caused widespread issues across Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and the broader Microsoft 365 platform. The outage is also impacting Azure — Microsoft’s flagship cloud infrastructure that underpins critical systems for businesses and governments worldwide.

Outage tracker Downdetector showed thousands of reports from users unable to access Microsoft services early this morning. The company confirmed “some users may experience delays” and “connectivity issues” with Outlook and other Microsoft 365 products.

Microsoft said the problem stemmed from “DNS issues” — the same root cause behind last week’s AWS outage. A spokesperson confirmed engineers were “rerouting affected traffic to restore service health” and working to resolve an “inadvertent configuration change” believed to be behind the failure.

In the UK, websites for Asda and O2 were impacted, while in the US, Starbucks and Kroger customers also reported access problems. In Australia, several businesses relying on Azure-hosted systems experienced interruptions, further highlighting the risks of global dependence on a handful of cloud providers.

Azure’s network infrastructure was listed as “critical” across all global regions, with Microsoft admitting it could not yet estimate how long the outage would last.

The incident has reignited concerns over Microsoft’s dominance in cloud and productivity software.

Some industry observers are calling on the Federal Government to investigate whether the company’s near-monopoly position poses systemic risks to business continuity.

Dr Saqib Kakvi of Royal Holloway Universityin the UK warned that the consolidation of cloud services into just three major players — Microsoft, Amazon, and Google — has created a fragile ecosystem.

“Economic forces have put all our eggs in one of three baskets,” he said. “When one goes down, the fallout can cripple hundreds or even thousands of systems worldwide.”