Microsoft Outage Causes Widespread Disruption Worldwide

A widespread Microsoft service disruption has cut off users across the globe from Outlook, Teams and other tools relied on for everyday work.

The effects were felt on both sides of the world. Some US employees headed home early on Thursday, while Australian businesses struggled to print invoices and schools lost access to online lessons on Friday.

The outage lasted for hours, with no immediate resolution. At 3:30 a.m. GMT Friday, services were still experiencing broad problems, affecting millions of users.
Microsoft shared progress reports on X and its service health page. At 1:59 a.m.

GMT, the company said it was seeing encouraging signs as it restarted affected systems and worked to restore server availability in stages.
However, a later update at 3:13 a.m. GMT said the changes intended to improve service had not worked as expected.

Microsoft said it was exploring other ways to expand capacity while managing ongoing traffic imbalances, a message that left many users confused. If Outlook is failing to send or receive your messages, the outage is likely the reason.

The disruption prompted a mix of reactions. Some US workers welcomed the email shutdown and joked about starting their weekends early. Others switched to Slack, phone calls or face-to-face conversations to keep working.

The outage began around midday on the US East Coast and quickly became a major problem for organizations as it continued. Services connected to Exchange Online and Microsoft’s email systems were affected, including Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Microsoft 365 and Copilot.

Small businesses sought other ways to stay in touch, while local governments asked residents to contact them by phone rather than email.

By Friday morning in Australia, users were also finding Microsoft’s cloud services unavailable. Court livestreams went offline, and schools asked parents to report absences by phone until email was working again.

Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC, reported that some people missed job interviews after being unable to join video calls. The disruption also contributed to supply problems at distribution centers serving supermarkets.

Microsoft initially said the connection problems were affecting “the Americas,” but the impact soon proved to be international.
Downdetector recorded a high of 130,000 reports involving Outlook, although the actual number of affected users was likely much higher because many people never file a report. Reports dropped as the US workday came to an end.

Microsoft later said some servers had resumed operation, but users continued to experience inconsistent access to email. In an update at 10:09 p.m. GMT, the company acknowledged that its actions had not brought the expected improvement.

The company said it was working to restore access, but warned in a later update that servers brought back online could stop responding again once traffic returned. As a result, Outlook remained unreliable for many users.

Here’s hoping Microsoft restores its services soon, allowing businesses, schools, and public agencies to get back to work without disruption and bringing everyone’s digital day back to normal.