Microsoft Outage: Outlook, Teams Restored After 24-Hour Global Failure
Microsoft said on Saturday that Teams, Outlook and other products had fully recovered after a global outage that lasted more than 24 hours. Downdetector logged over 7.4 million reports, and governments, airlines and trading firms were affected.
Microsoft said on Saturday that services had fully recovered across Teams, Outlook and its other products, ending a Microsoft outage that disrupted online communications for businesses and governments worldwide for more than 24 hours.
"We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions," the company posted on X.
What Microsoft says went wrong
Microsoft said the global outage stemmed from a technical issue, not a cyberattack or artificial intelligence. In an update on Friday it said the incident was introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade and surfaced after a recent network change. It reported no evidence of malicious activity.
The outage hit features tied to Exchange Online, the company's cloud-based email and scheduling hub. It also affected the Copilot AI assistant. Applications not connected to Exchange Online kept working. Organizations that run Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than in the cloud, were somewhat spared.
Who was affected
Outlook and Teams are used by hundreds of millions of people. The outage stopped users from sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.
Government agencies from Australia and Japan to the United States were affected, according to public statements. The US House of Representatives said its technology teams worked with Microsoft to restore email for members. Baltimore County Government said staff could not send or receive email, but 911 and other essential services were not affected.
The UK government said it was still experiencing email problems on Friday. Some NHS practices in Britain could not send or receive email, and patients were advised to phone instead. In Australia, the intelligence agency ASIO and the Australian Federal Police were affected.
Trading firms faced delays, some companies were hindered from publishing earnings, and airlines warned customers of communication lags. In India, IndiGo and Akasa Air reported problems with customer-support email.
The scale in numbers
Reports began climbing around 1725 GMT on Thursday, according to Ookla, the parent company of Downdetector. Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide. They peaked at nearly 20,000 a minute, more than 1,500 times normal levels.
"It shows how much of the working day now runs through one provider's email and collaboration tools," said Luke Kehoe, lead industry analyst at Ookla.
Australia's Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was dealing with something similar to the CrowdStrike incident, "where there is an update that has gone awry."
Market and insurance impact
Microsoft shares closed flat at $523.88 on Friday. The stock has gained roughly 8 percent so far this year.
Mario De Cicco, vice president of European financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS, estimated global insured losses at between $300 million and $500 million. That is below the $400 million to $1.5 billion toll from the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which crashed more than 8 million Windows-based computers. He said the overall hit to insurers should be limited.
The outage is one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second disruption to its services this year. Microsoft 365 also had outages in January this year and in October last year, and an Azure cloud outage last month affected its productivity software.
"The bigger worry is that this is not the first Microsoft 365 outage this year," said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro.
