Microsoft 365 Outage Stretches Into Second Day, Disrupting Outlook, Teams and Copilot Worldwide

A global outage of Microsoft 365 that began Thursday afternoon U.S. time stretched into a second day on Friday, leaving workers, schools, hospitals and government agencies on several continents without reliable access to Outlook email, calendars, Copilot and other services. Microsoft said recovery was progressing region by region but that some users would continue to see intermittent problems.

The disruption began around 6 p.m. GMT on Thursday, according to The Guardian, which is about 1 p.m. Eastern time. The Washington Post reported that the outage-tracking site Downdetector logged almost 130,000 problem reports about Outlook from U.S. users just after 1 p.m. Thursday, and that reports came in from 74 countries and territories within about an hour.

What Microsoft has said

Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services, the Associated Press reported. Users reported that Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot were down. The company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions, according to the AP, though the number of people affected by this outage has not been disclosed.

In status updates quoted by Australian and British outlets, Microsoft said a large number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, putting strain on the remaining infrastructure. The company said a core process on the affected servers was being overwhelmed, causing a loss of capacity, and that restored servers could become unresponsive again once they began receiving traffic. "We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service," Microsoft said in a statement reported by The Nightly in Australia. WION reported that the company was also considering reverting a small number of recent configuration changes.

At one point overnight, Microsoft acknowledged that a fix was "not taking as expected," The Guardian reported. By Friday morning in Europe, the company said it was seeing "encouraging recovery progress in Europe, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure." It added that Japan remained comparatively more stable and that North America was also improving.

Microsoft said on its status page that it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident, according to The Independent. The company said it would publish full details of the root cause and planned repairs in a post-incident report once the problem is mitigated.

Governments report disruption

In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said he had been briefed by Microsoft and by the country's National Cyber Security Coordinator, Lt. Gen. Michelle McGuinness. "The perspective of Microsoft at this stage: they do not believe they are dealing with a cyber event," Burke said. He compared the situation to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, saying, "There is an update that has gone awry," and added that the impact was "very much on email systems." Burke said the government had activated a digital resilience agreement with Microsoft so that Australia would receive priority in restoring services, according to the Sydney Dispatch, citing the ABC. Australia's spy agency and federal police were among organizations reporting disruption, The Independent reported.

In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki told reporters that the government's information infrastructure, called the Government Solution Service, had been hit, the AP reported. The Guardian reported that Japan's economy, trade and industry minister said the disruption had a "major impact." In Germany, a digital ministry spokesperson said the outage was expected to have a significant impact on businesses, though there had been no reports of major outages in the federal administration, according to Reuters as cited by The Guardian.

In Britain, the prime minister's deputy spokeswoman said, "We're working with departments and with Microsoft to establish the full picture, and where services are disrupted, departments have contingency arrangements in place." The Bank of England said all of its critical operations were running normally, while the Financial Conduct Authority said it was monitoring the effect on financial firms, The Guardian reported.

Hospitals, schools and travelers affected

NHS England said staff were using other IT systems or paper records where possible. "Patients should continue to use 999 in an emergency, and otherwise use 111, 111 online, or their local pharmacy, and come forward for appointments unless told otherwise," an NHS England spokesperson said. NHS Tayside in Scotland said core clinical systems remained available but that some GP practices had difficulty receiving test results and processing prescription requests.

The schools inspector Ofsted said it could not receive emails and asked people not to send any, and the exam regulator Ofqual said its complaints service was not working. The University of Manchester told students and staff to use telephones for urgent external communications. National Rail warned that some passengers might not be able to open train tickets sent to their email inboxes and advised them to use the retailer's website or app instead.

The outage also reached companies outside Microsoft. AI developers OpenAI and Anthropic said they had faced issues with Microsoft connectors, and Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected, The Guardian reported. Microsoft has not given an estimated time for full restoration of service.

Sources

• Associated Press: Microsoft struggles to restore email and other services in a global outage
• Associated Press: Live updates on the worldwide Microsoft outage
• The Washington Post: Microsoft outage continues into second day
• The Guardian: Microsoft outage live coverage
• The Independent: Microsoft outage latest
• The Nightly: Australian officials on the Microsoft outage
• Sydney Dispatch: Burke says outage was not a cyber attack
• WION: Microsoft 365 outage hits airlines, banks and governments
• Microsoft service health status