A global outage taking down a wide range of Microsoft 365 services remains ongoing Friday morning.
The outage started midday Thursday, impacting users of Microsoft email, cloud, and AI services. Microsoft has documented the full list of services impacted by the error, while moving early Friday morning to protect customers around the world from losing emails during the extended disruptions.
“Recovery actions are ongoing,” the Microsoft 365 Status account confirmed on X. “To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours.”
Similar to recent world-shaking outages of widely used tech like Amazon Web Services and CrowdStrike , the Microsoft disruption looks like “one of the biggest outages of all time,” Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, told NBC News . Possibly even “worse,” he suggested.
Businesses, hospitals, police departments, and schools were among those scrambling to work around the outage. In Japan, it disrupted government IT infrastructure, according to deputy chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki. NBC’s report documented various harms, noting that “few public bodies were immune from the outage.” In some cases, doctors couldn’t send patients “important” updates on medication changes or follow-up care.
The financial sector suffered, too, with people blocked from making bank transfers since they couldn’t receive verification codes.
Justice systems were also hobbled. The Supreme Court in the Philippines saw its legal work derailed, NBC reported. And one US sheriff’s office in Colorado reported that the outage made it difficult for people to post bond for prisoners’ immediate release.
It’s unclear how many users were affected, but Microsoft estimated in January that the total number of paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions exceeded 450 million.
On a status page, Microsoft said “we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident” and promised to “share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.”
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” Microsoft said on X.
But Microsoft’s public statements make clear that the tech giant was blindsided by the outage and struggled for hours to find mitigations that could reliably restore user access.
