Microsoft is fixing a massive global outage for its popular workplace software that dragged on into a second day, disrupting everything from emails to police emergency calls and AI tools.
A wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were affected.
Microsoft first flagged the problem on Thursday. It indicated that it was making some headway as it tried to restore services in fresh updates posted Friday on social media.
The extent of the outage wasn’t clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
The Latest on the outage:
Microsoft has been spending heavily on AI, while trimming its workforce
Last month, Microsoft offered 60,000 employees, or about 27% of its workforce globally, voluntary buyouts. It's unclear how many workers have accepted such offers (and actual departures are reportedly scheduled for December). But the announcement arrived just months after Microsoft initiated 4,800 job cuts, notably in its Xbox video game business.
For the 4,800 layoffs announced in July, Microsoft’s chief people officer Amy Coleman cited unspecified changes in customer needs and stated that the eliminated roles “are not being replaced by AI.” Still, the broader workforce reductions arrive as the software giant spends heavily on artificial intelligence overall.
In its latest quarterly earnings, Microsoft raked in a profit of $36.63 billion and revenue of $92.28 billion, surpassing Wall Street expectations. The company continued to tout its AI and cloud-based investments.
Microsoft has not tied this week’s outage to recent job reductions at the company.
Influential British lawmaker says UK overly dependent on US firms
Chi Onwurah, who chairs the science and technology committee of lawmakers, says the outage “only serves to highlight once again the lack of resilience in the UK’s digital infrastructure, and the dangers that this dependency can pose to our security, economy and public services.”
She said her committee has previously warned that the U.K. is “hugely dependent” on a small number of U.S.-based technology providers providing services, preventing homegrown alternatives from developing.
Government bodies were forced to implement contingency measures in response to the outage, affecting a wide array of services.
Though issues have been reported in the state-run National Health Service, transport networks and the courts, the disruption does not appear to have been too impactful.
Microsoft stock slips slightly after the opening bell
The company's stock declined 1.4% in premarket trading Friday.
Outlook comes back online for many impacted users
As of Friday morning in North America, Microsoft’s Outlook email service was up and running again for many users.
The company pointed to recovery improvements — writing on social media just after 9 a.m. ET that email queues were "significantly reduced and approaching normal levels." But Microsoft warned that some users may still encounter "intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery." Several thousand users on the outage tracker Downdetector continued to report errors.
Greece’s government ministiries impacted by outage
Greece’s Minister of Digital Governance Dimitrios Papastergiou said Friday that the Microsoft outage has affected government ministries using Outlook, Teams and Copilot but not to the degree that would significantly hamper their work.
He told private Skai television that this is indicative of how countries should develop technological alternatives on what is deemed crucial for the smooth operation of government.
Papastergiou said Greece is investing in such infrastructure and that there’s a conversation that’s ongoing within the European Union about putting in place these alternatives.
“This is what we’re doing in the Greek public service in recent years, we have a hybrid system meaning we have services on our systems and we have fewer critical data in the digital cloud,” Papastergiou said.
He urged the public and businesses to be vigilant in safeguarding access to their computers in light of the risk posed by hackers.
X users laugh at hard-to-decipher official updates from Microsoft 365 account
As Microsoft scrambled to recover services Friday, some users on X poked fun at the official updates sent during the outage by the Microsoft 355 Status account.
The account included long numbers and technical details in posts related to the operations the company was looking into to restore service.
“At first I was confused about this but now they have explained it’s a EX1550543 and MO1550821 issue, I totally get it,” an account on X said.
Another asked: “Does Microsoft not have a comms team? Because who on earth approved this messaging?”
For snail mail providers, Microsoft crash was a chance to gloat
Britain’s Royal Mail posted a photo on X of one of its trademark red post boxes with a simple message: “No Inbox, No Problem.”
The message at the top of the post said: “Ours is always open.”
Some customers of the privately run company, though, pointed out that Microsoft would be fixed faster than any letter could arrive.
Outage shows reliance on Microsoft and its suite of services can be crippling, experts say
“E-mail remains quite important not only to how we work, but to almost every aspect of everyday life,” said Stephen McQuiston of the University of St. Andrews computer science school. “Microsoft’s services also share a lot of the same common infrastructure. When one of those components fails, it means that Outlook, Teams, and Copilot can fail at the same time, even though they appear to be different products.”
Steven Watt, cybersecurity professor at St. Andrews, said that in the absence of manual workarounds, the incident raised questions about resilience rather than choice of technology.
“Which of our critical processes depend on a single supplier?” he said. “How long could we operate if that supplier were unavailable? What is our fallback for communicating with staff, customers and regulators? Have we tested it, or do we simply assume it exists? A continuity plan that relies on the same platform that has just failed is not a plan.”
Global reach of outage was swift
When Microsoft’s outage first erupted on Thursday, tracker Downdetector said it received outage reports from 74 countries and territories in the matter of about an hour.
"Outlook reports alone peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level," Downdetector wrote in an update on social media Thursday afternoon.
Redditors recall life before emails
For some unfortunate souls, Teams sadly still worked. Others were forced to pivot to alternate forms of communication.
“Having meetings on WhatsApp now instead,” one Redditor wrote.
“My boss pointed out the program that has our training on still works,” someone else posted.
Still more turned to other screens for entertainment: “Feet up on the sofa, coffee in hand and playing a bit of xbox, wonderful start to the day,” another said. “Hopefully outlook is down for the remainder of the day.”
But the outage also brought a nostalgia not seen since the 1900s.
“It’s actually been quite fun in the office,” another Redditor wrote. “It feels like a bit of a social event — everyone is chatting, we’ve ordered breakfast in, planning a pub visit this afternoon if it continues. Is this what the 90s felt like?”
Brands tease Microsoft for outage as they seek online eyeballs
The internet was quickly flooded with brands chasing their own clout on the back of Microsoft’s misfortune.
“Emails can wait. The world has been waiting long enough,” Air India wrote on X. “Consider this your cue to plan that getaway.”
The airline’s post featured a photo with a view out an airplane window with the quip, “A change of outlook we’d highly recommend.”
But the UK arm of discount grocery chain Aldi suggested staying home, writing “Microsoft being down is the equivalent of an adult snow day right?!” on Facebook.
Burger King instead opted for a message directed at Microsoft: “whoever’s troubleshooting and working on the outage rn…take your time. go out and get a Whopper.”
Signs of recovery as outage drags into a second day
Microsoft said Friday that it was seeing “continued recovery progress,” including “broader improvements” in North America and “sustained improvements across much of Europe,” as well as “encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific.”
But some users could continue to “experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery,” the company said.
Microsoft first flagged the problem just before 1 p.m. Eastern Time Thursday. A series of posts on X suggested the company’s engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control, with the company saying at one point that the changes were “not taking as expected.” But in its most recent post, it reported “email delivery performance improving.”
It’s not known how many users were affected but Microsoft has more than 450 million paying subscribers for its Microsoft 365 office software service.
Microsoft says progress is being made
The company indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress Friday, saying it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements,” and that there was “incremental improvement in several workloads.”
But problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company’s services and anecdotal reports on social media.
The Microsoft outage means no incessant email chimes or message pings, but still we stayed online
It was the sound of e-silence.
No Microsoft Outlook email chimes, no Teams message pings, no new notifications and, very possibly, no work getting done.
Microsoft 365 teetered on the edge of becoming Microsoft 364 as the global outage stretched from Thursday into, ironically (or fittingly, depending on your personal outlook), Friday the 13th. The disruption has impacted an unknown number of netizens, but the total could be as high as 450 million — the figure the tech giant touts as the number of paid customers of the Microsoft 365 apps.
Many of us were doing the same thing: Refresh, refresh, refresh.
But what really happens when an essential workplace tool goes quiet, and the silence is heard around the world?
Sadly, it seems, the extended break online did not mean that we went outside — or even offline. Thousands used the 21st century technology of social media to complain about the 20th century invention of email. Memes sprang up across the internet as brands like airlines rushed to capitalize early Friday on an unexpected long weekend.
The British government said it’s ’working closely; with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services
It also said that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption.
So far, the outages do not appear to have caused much of a problem to frontline services beyond the absence of emails.
Police forces have said they are unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call emergency responders to make any urgent reports.
The National Pharmacy Association also said there may be delays for some to get their prescriptions, as the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Services.
Hospitals have meanwhile urged patients to attend appointments as normal.
Companies and government agencies face interruptions in their operations
Governments, businesses from Japan to Australia affected
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.
“They (Microsoft) don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told reporters in Sydney.
In July 2024, a massive global tech outage grounded flights, disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers, with Texas-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike blaming a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows that allowed its systems to push bad data out to millions of customer machines.
Microsoft scrambles to recover services
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.”
Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website.
Roughly 130,000 users from dozens of countries reported problems accessing Outlook on the outage tracker Downdetector on Thursday, although reports have since declined.
A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.
Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.
Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote.
In a more recent update Friday, Microsoft said “we’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.”