Global Microsoft outage: email, Teams and Copilot down for nearly a day worldwide

What happened and how Microsoft explains it

A global outage in Microsoft services began on Thursday and continued into Friday, affecting the Microsoft 365 subscription suite: Outlook email, the Teams messenger and video conferencing service, SharePoint and OneDrive storage, as well as the Copilot AI assistant. According to Anadolu, the core of the problem was Exchange Online — the system that provides email and calendars for corporate Outlook accounts: all services depending on it stopped working, while those not connected to it continued to function. TechCrunch adds that the outage also took down the Defender security software and left system administrators without access to Intune dashboards; some users experienced problems with cloud Windows computers.

Scale and cause

Within about an hour, the Downdetector tracker received reports from 74 countries and territories; the peak of reports about Outlook problems in the US reached around 130,000. Microsoft explained the outage by saying that 'a large number of servers unexpectedly became unavailable,' which put strain on the rest of the infrastructure: servers brought back online failed again as traffic returned. The company also rolled back a recent network configuration change that coincided with the start of the problem. Microsoft Executive Vice President Charles Lamanna said there were no signs of a cyberattack; in a status update on Friday, the company reported 'no evidence of malicious activity.' TechCrunch notes that Microsoft has not yet named the exact cause and continues its investigation; the company's representative did not respond to the outlet's inquiry about whether technical means exist to verify what happened.

Recovery took about 18 hours

By Friday morning on the US East Coast, Outlook email began to recover. Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at the company Kentik, said in a post on Bluesky that traffic is returning to Microsoft services after roughly 18 hours of downtime. Microsoft reported progress in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and North America: access to mailboxes and email delivery were improving, although some users could still encounter intermittent failures.

Who was affected by the outage

The consequences extended far beyond the IT sector. In Japan, according to Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki, the outage disrupted the government's general IT infrastructure, and civil servants switched to paper documents; some banks and brokers confirmed transactions by fax. In Singapore, government email stopped working, and the Supreme Court of the Philippines warned of possible delays in the judicial system's operations. In Australia, video broadcasts from courts were interrupted, the outage affected the Federal Police and the intelligence agency ASIO, and schools asked parents to report children's absences by phone. Dr. Michael Bonning, president of the Australian Medical Association, told The Guardian that some medical facilities returned to paper prescriptions: access to the electronic prescription system required multi-factor authentication via Microsoft email. In the US, the administrations of Miami Beach, Austin, and Jacksonville reported email problems, and the sheriff of Arapahoe County in Colorado said the jail could not accept online bail payments due to email notifications being unavailable. In Britain, local authorities in Scotland and the Metropolitan Police were affected; the police warned that online crime reports might not reach officers; a number of NHS organizations asked people to call instead of sending emails. The outage also hit the AI industry: OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with tools connecting their services to Microsoft 365. Bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong were unable to use email and Teams for hours, National Rail in Britain warned passengers about emailed tickets being unavailable, and the airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air reported disruptions in customer support.

Second major outage in two months

For Microsoft, this is already the second major incident in a short period: in September, the company attributed a multi-day outage of its cloud services to the problem with the 'basic authentication configuration', which prevented users from signing in to the services. TechCrunch suggests that the company will have to answer questions about its inability to quickly recover from an outage caused by its own systems. Notably, in both cases Microsoft ruled out malicious involvement, but this time the exact technical cause remained undetermined at the time of publication.