Microsoft Deeply Sorry for 18-Hour Outage Hitting 70+ Countries
Microsoft apologized after an outage that began Thursday evening disrupted Outlook, Teams and other 365 services in more than 70 countries. The company blamed a network capacity upgrade, not cyber or AI agents, and said services were recovering gradually by Friday.
Microsoft said it is deeply sorry for a global outage of its Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, that began Thursday evening and disrupted users in more than 70 countries. Services were broadly recovering by Friday afternoon, nearly 24 hours after the problems started.
The company said the cause was a technical issue introduced during a "network capacity upgrade". It said the incident was not related to cyber-attacks or artificial intelligence agents.
Scale of the disruption
More than 430 million people use the affected products worldwide, according to Microsoft. The outage lasted roughly 18 hours before services began to recover just before midday GMT on Friday.
Down Detector, a site that tracks outages, showed a rise in Microsoft 365 problems at about 6pm GMT on Thursday. It logged nearly 130,000 reports across 74 countries, covering Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot, Microsoft's AI chatbot.
Microsoft first acknowledged at 17:54 GMT on Thursday that users in the Americas could not reach Exchange Online mailboxes. By 04:36 on Friday it reported only a "partial recovery" in some regions. By 13:32 it cited "broader improvements" in North America, "sustained improvements" across much of Europe and "encouraging recovery signals" in Asia Pacific.
Microsoft shares dipped slightly when Wall Street opened, down 1.1% at $516.86.
Who was affected
In the UK, parts of the NHS, including GPs and hospitals, were hit, along with some schools and police forces. Several police forces urged people to phone in crimes rather than report them online. UK cyber minister Liz Lloyd said the impact on frontline services such as 999 calls was "limited" and transport was not disrupted.
In the US, House of Representatives staff said the outage set back a full day of legislative work. Tampa, Florida, posted notices about the problem, and one Colorado sheriff's office said it could not process bond payments.
Canada's national rail network warned passengers might not receive trip emails, and hospitals there had email problems. Singapore's government said some systems were affected. The Japanese government, the Philippines Supreme Court and an Australian spy agency were also hit. Advisers at the COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, could not access Outlook.
In Australia, risk advisory firm RSM Australia expected the financial impact to run to billions of dollars.
Smaller firms felt it too. South African winemaker Peter Pentz said his business was brought to a "standstill". Georgia, from Staffordshire, said her first house purchase was likely to be delayed because her solicitor could not contact other agencies.
Microsoft's response
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," a Microsoft spokesperson said. "We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously."
Microsoft said it was restoring services gradually to keep them stable, and that email queues were "significantly reduced and approaching normal levels". Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice-president of Copilot, said: "We regret that today's outages caused disruptions for our customers."
The company said it had addressed the underlying issue but did not say when services would fully recover. OpenAI and Anthropic also reported problems with their Microsoft connectors during the outage.
