• Hours-long outage: A massive Microsoft outage has left millions around the world without access to Outlook email, Teams meeting tools and other staples of modern office life.
• Global disruption: In the United States, fed-up workers at some companies went home early on Thursday. In Australia, businesses couldn’t print invoices and some schools couldn’t hold online classes on Friday.
• No quick fix: As Europe woke on Friday morning, the outage was still widespread, affecting untold millions of people. Microsoft initially said it was “seeing positive results” with efforts to resolve the issue. But hours later it said it had not yet observed a “sustained recovery.”
Microsoft said it had not yet observed a “sustained recovery” in areas affected by the widespread outage.
“We’re continuing our efforts to improve server stability to improve traffic flow,” it said late on Thursday in a post to its X account for Microsoft365 service incidents.
“We’re observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren’t resulting in sustained recovery.”
Some US office workers celebrated the email blackout and joked that they could start the weekend early.
Others barely missed a beat, connecting with colleagues via Slack, phone and even the old-fashioned in-person way.
But the outage, which began around noon on the US East Coast, caused serious headaches, especially when it dragged on for more than an hour or two.
In Australia, Friday began with a realization that the Microsoft cloud was unresponsive. The outage took out live feeds from courts, and schools texted parents to phone in any absences until email systems were restored.
Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC, reported people missing job interviews because they couldn’t connect to virtual meetings, and even some supply issues with distribution centers stocking supermarkets due to the outage.
A massive Microsoft outage has left people around the world without access to Outlook email, Teams meeting tools and other staples of modern office life.
In the United States, fed-up workers at some companies went home early on Thursday. In Australia, businesses couldn’t print invoices and some schools couldn’t hold online classes on Friday.
And there was no quick fix. As of 3:30 a.m. GMT on Friday, the outage was still widespread, affecting untold millions of people.
Microsoft is posting updates on X and on its “service health status” page .
But in another post at 3:13 a.m. GMT, the company said, “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected.”
“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” the company added, leaving users on X befuddled.
