New York (AP) —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.”
HONG KONG (AP) —Microsoft said progress is being made in bringing its popular workplace software back online as a global outage enters its second day, disrupting business communications, police emergency calls, court operations and AI tools.
The outage, which affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, left many complaining they couldn't access their emails.
Microsoft indicated that it was making some headway as it tried to restore services, in fresh updates posted Friday on social media.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” the company said in its latest update, as some users started reporting that their emails were restored.
On a separate status page, the company reported “broader improvements” in North America and “sustained improvements across much of Europe,” as well as “encouraging recovery signals” in the Asia-Pacific region.
Some users could still have “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said.
The total number of people affected is not clear, but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
Microsoft scrambles to recover services
The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem, which it flagged 18 hours earlier on Thursday, and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”
The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”
A series of 20 posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.
One post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution, saying the changes were "not taking as expected,” the company wrote.
By Friday morning, Microsoft reported “early stabilization and capacity improvements” and “incremental improvement in several workloads.”
“We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue,” it said in a subsequent post.
In its latest post, the company said it was focusing on “recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction.”
Europe woke up to disruptions
In Britain, the outage brought a halt to a trial in Manchester. Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home because of delays that he said illustrated the danger of the court’s reliance on technology.
The British government said it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services but that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption.
British police forces said they're unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call emergency responders to make any urgent reports.
The National Pharmacy Association said people could face delays getting their prescriptions because the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Service.
In Norway, the government said the outage affected “several ministries," including losing email access, and it had “not received any indication" about when the problem would be resolved.
Asian businesses and governments were affected
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. That outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers.
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.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company could not receive updates from its U.S. customers through Outlook. If the situation dragged on further, this could “impact the production timeline,” he said. Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also saw part of their operations disrupted.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline company, also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said that government emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.
The Philippines' Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the outage affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the government’s IT infrastructure was affected and that officials were “keeping a close eye on the developments.” Japanese authorities had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools such as telephones, the government said.
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.
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HONG KONG (AP) — From Asia to the U.S., Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted many users, companies and some government operations as the technology giant struggled to fix the issue.
Microsoft said in an update Friday that the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
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.”
The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”
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.”
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 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.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company's Outlook accounts could not receive updates from their U.S. customers due to the outage. If the situation dragged on further, this could “impact the production timeline,” he said. Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also saw part of their operations disrupted.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline company, said it also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said that government emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.
The Philippines' Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government’s IT infrastructure and that they were “keeping a close eye on the developments.” Japanese authorities had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools such as telephones, the government said.
OpenAI and Anthropic each reported that they were facing problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.
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