Microsoft 365 Outage Spreads Across Email, Hospitals, Courts, and Governments

Microsoft 365 services remained unstable Friday morning after a global outage began midday Thursday, disrupting Outlook, Teams, Copilot, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Exchange Online, and Microsoft Defender. Users in 74 countries reported trouble with email, cloud tools, meetings, document sharing, task management, and services connected to Microsoft’s infrastructure.

Outlook suffered the clearest damage. Users said they could not open mailboxes through the web, apps, or mobile devices, while messages that did send often arrived late. At about 07:00 GMT on Friday, Microsoft had received at least 43,000 reports of Outlook problems from users in 72 countries, although the company has not confirmed how many people were affected.

Microsoft 365 has more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions, giving the disruption a reach far beyond a normal workplace technology problem. The outage also affected integrations used by OpenAI and Anthropic, showing how one failure inside a major cloud platform can spread into other digital services.

A service failure that reached public institutions

Businesses, hospitals, police departments, and schools scrambled to work around the outage. Government systems in Singapore and Japan were disrupted, while Australia’s spy agency and federal police were among the organizations hit. In Japan, deputy chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki said the disruption affected government IT infrastructure.

The effects reached medical care and financial services. Some doctors could not send patients important updates about medication changes or follow-up care, while people trying to make bank transfers were blocked because verification codes did not arrive. Justice systems also struggled: the Supreme Court of the Philippines saw legal work derailed, and a sheriff’s office in Colorado said the outage made it difficult for people to post bond for prisoners’ immediate release.

Few public bodies were immune from the outage. DownDetector showed that reports of connectivity problems peaked Thursday afternoon and fell by Friday morning, but that did not mean every service had returned to normal. One Outlook user said outgoing messages appeared to work while incoming mail arrived inconsistently.

What Microsoft says went wrong

Microsoft first described “a portion of infrastructure” as experiencing elevated load across multiple regions. The company later stressed that the load did not come from increased traffic. Instead, servers were failing automated health checks and becoming unavailable, forcing traffic toward other servers.

That created a chain reaction. Walter Pasquarelli, an affiliate researcher at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, compared it to a highway losing lanes: when traffic shifts onto fewer routes, the remaining lanes become overloaded and the whole system can stop moving. Rupert Goodwins, a technology analyst and journalist, said servers returning to service were immediately swamped by other servers trying to reconnect and synchronize their files.

Microsoft said a core process on affected servers was becoming overwhelmed and causing capacity loss. Engineers isolated part of the infrastructure, restarted affected components, and reintroduced traffic to test whether services stayed stable. Some restored servers then became unresponsive again once they received traffic, creating another hurdle.

Software deployments and configuration changes were paused while recent changes were reviewed, but Microsoft said none matched the start of the disruption. On Friday, the company was rolling back a network change without saying whether that change caused the outage. Microsoft has not published a root cause.

Recovery continues, but email remains vulnerable

“Recovery actions are ongoing,” the Microsoft 365 Status account said. Microsoft also extended email timeout to 48 hours “to help preserve delayed mail during this event.” The move was designed to keep delayed messages from being lost while engineers worked through the backlog.

Microsoft said it had achieved broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific. Still, it warned that some users could face intermittent access problems or delayed email delivery as mitigation continued across the remaining affected infrastructure.

The company said its priority was stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in affected areas, and reducing delayed email queues while checking service consistency across connection methods. It has not given a timeline for full recovery, and users may see services return gradually as their apps reconnect rather than all at once.

Microsoft says there is no evidence of malicious activity or a cyberattack. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.” The company promised to share a full post-incident report with the root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation ends.

Why the outage matters

Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, called the disruption “one of the biggest outages of all time” and suggested it was possibly even “worse.” Goodwins said the scale was impressive, while Pasquarelli described the immediate danger as a communication risk because organizations rely on these tools without thinking about what happens when they disappear.

This is not Microsoft’s first major outage this year. Microsoft 365 went down across North America for almost 10 hours in January, and thousands of Outlook users worldwide were locked out of their mailboxes in late August. The wider technology industry has also seen major failures, including an Amazon Web Services outage in October 2025 and a faulty CrowdStrike update in July 2024 that crashed computers, canceled flights, disrupted hospitals, and caused billions of dollars in losses.

The latest outage arrives as Europe pushes for greater technological sovereignty and seeks to rely less on foreign providers. Without technology giants of its own, Europe depends heavily on US companies for digital services. The disruption makes that dependence harder to ignore, while also raising a practical question for every organization using cloud software: what is the minimum viable service needed to keep operating during a global outage?

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