A more than 12-hour outage of Microsoft Outlook and Teams crippled communications for businesses and governments globally on Friday, forcing some organizations to revert to fax machines.
Microsoft said server issues were behind the incident that also affected its Copilot AI assistant and that a broader rollout of software fixes was starting to stabilize the system. It said it was not aware of any malicious activity.
The Redmond, Wash.-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”
Microsoft said in a new update that it was seeing “broader improvements” in North America and much of Europe.
Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications, with hundreds of millions of users. The outage prevented people from performing essential functions such as sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.
It affected government agencies from Australia to Japan to the United States, caused delays at trading firms, hindered some companies from publishing earnings and prompted airlines to warn customers of communication lags, according to public statements.
The outage is one of the longest in Microsoft’s history and the second disruption to its services this year.
Questions about tech reliance, cloud systems
Organizations that host Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than in the cloud, were somewhat spared.
Microsoft said the outage specifically hit features tied to Exchange Online — its cloud-based email and scheduling hub — leaving unconnected applications operational.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website, with the outage affecting individual users, companies and some government operations.
Trading and administrative work slowed in places, the latest reminder of how much of the world’s commerce, public services and communications run on a handful of technology providers.
WATCH | The latest on who’s reporting outages and disruptions:
Microsoft says service being restored on 2nd day of worldwide outage
Microsoft said in an update Friday that service is gradually being restored after a global outage lasting more than 12 hours affected users of products such as Outlook email, Teams videoconferencing and the Copilot AI agent.
Caitlin Egen of Control Risks said that big global firms usually have contingency plans, but when key services went down abruptly it was still a “wake-up call.”
“For a lot of businesses this morning, it’s probably been chaos trying to figure out how to even get in touch with people,” she said.
Could result in losses of hundreds of millions
European exchange operator Euronext, which runs exchanges in Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Oslo, Athens and Milan, told listed companies to pick up the phone.
Aviva, which reported earnings on Friday, said it had put backup plans in place, including sending out alternative phone numbers for earnings calls and using Bluetooth to transfer recordings because email was down.
Mario De Cicco, vice-president of European financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS, estimated global insured losses from the incident at between $300 million US and $500 million — below the $400 million to $1.5 billion financial toll from the 2024 CrowdStrike outage that crashed more than eight million Windows-based computers and caused widespread disruptions.
WATCH | Canadians tell CBC News how they’ve been affected:
Microsoft says services slowly being restored after widespread outages | Hanomansing Live
Tens of thousands of Microsoft users across Canada and the United States were struggling to access Outlook’s email services, Copilot’s AI software and other essential programs Thursday in a widespread outage. As of Thursday evening, Microsoft said it was returning some of its affected servers to full service.
Unity Health Toronto said its teams are experiencing difficulties sending and receiving emails, but that patient and resident care is not affected by the outage.
In Montreal, the CHUM hospital said the outage affected appointment requests and some internal activities.
Via Rail said some customers were not receiving emails about their trips and advised passengers to check its train tracker or sign up for text notifications.
Some departments at federal, provincial and municipal governments across Canada also experienced email disruptions.
In Australia, where the spy agency and federal police were among organizations caught in the outage, Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft does not suspect a cyberattack.
“The impact that they are dealing with … is very much on email systems,” the minister said.
A spokesperson for the U.K. government said it was working with Microsoft to find a solution for the outage that hit organizations such as the National Health Service (NHS) and London’s Metropolitan Police.
A lack of access to emails and other services was impacting the Metropolitan Police’s ability to report some crimes online, though its ability to respond to calls was not affected.
NHS said its local services were turning to alternate measures, such as using IT systems or paper records.
American AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic also faced issues with Microsoft connectors, while Indian airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India said their email support services were impacted.
WATCH | Crowdstrike disruption 2 years ago led to similar questions:
Are we too dependent on Microsoft?
After two major outages in as many weeks — including the CrowdStrike crash — alarm bells are ringing about the world’s overreliance on Microsoft. Andrew Chang breaks down what happened, who’s to blame and digs into just how much of our lives are connected to Microsoft.
The incident deepens questions about essential software and the cloud infrastructure that underpins it.
“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. “If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands.”
Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and also in October of last year. Last month, it reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.
Still, some analysts have questioned whether such incidents can push customers on to rivals due to the steep switching costs of replacing tools embedded so deeply in daily operations.