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By Ellie Cook
Senior Defense Reporter
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A global outage impacting Microsoft comes just months after the U.S. Department of Defense signed a multi-billion dollar deal to use the technology giant's services.
It has raised questions over whether the Pentagon is wrangling with the same software and cloud-based services problems, which have affected governments and organizations worldwide for more than 18 hours.
The Pentagon said in May it would spent roughly $422 million annually over five years for Microsoft services. The deal with Dell Federal Systems will cost $9.7 billion and provide "critical" Microsoft services, the department's chief information officer, Kirsten Davies, said in a statement at the time.
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The deal brought together Microsoft software largely already used by the Department of Defense, the U.S. intelligence community and the U.S. Coast Guard under one agreement.
Microsoft's widely used Outlook, Teams and Copilot software remained down on Friday, wreaking havoc with everyday operations across the globe for businesses, health services and governments.
Shortly before 1 p.m. ET Thursday, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of users struggling to access some mailboxes in the U.S. and beyond. Within minutes, Microsoft said the issue was impacting users across the world.
It's not clear whether the Pentagon's operations and communications have been affected.
Elsewhere around the world, other nations saw government services go down - such as Australia's federal police and spy agency being impacted.
Microsoft said there was no indication that the outage was caused by a cyber attack.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
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