Tech and AI
Microsoft says it is “deeply sorry” for its global outage as Outlook and Teams broadly recover after about 18 hours
- What happened
- Microsoft apologised on Friday for the outage that took down Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other 365 services worldwide, and reported a broad recovery.
- Why it matters
- The failure hit hospitals, courts, police, schools and governments, and experts call it one of the biggest outages ever.
- What’s next
- Microsoft has promised a full post-incident report with the root cause once mitigation is complete; some users may still see delayed email.
How this story developed
- 15:40First report
- 16:152nd source
- 16:15Confirmed
- 18:263rd source
- 20:174th source
- 21:36+2 outlets in 6 min
- 15:40First reportAl Jazeera English
- 16:152nd sourceTechCrunch
- 16:15ConfirmedWas: Single source
- 18:263rd sourceArs Technica
- 20:174th sourceThe Guardian World
- 21:36Latest+2 outlets in 6 minBBC News World and South China Morning Post
Full story
An apology and a recovery
Microsoft said on Friday it was “deeply sorry” for the global outage that disrupted millions of users, organisations and businesses, and that it had addressed the underlying issue, the Guardian and the South China Morning Post reported. The company said it was seeing a broad recovery for Outlook email and other services, and ruled out any cyber or AI activity as the cause.
The trouble began around 1pm Eastern time on Thursday with Outlook and Teams and spread to much of Microsoft’s cloud, including Copilot, Defender and the Intune admin tools, TechCrunch reported. Doug Madory of the internet monitoring firm Kentik said traffic returned after about 18 hours of downtime. To preserve delayed mail, Microsoft extended its email timeout to 48 hours, Ars Technica said.
What went wrong
Microsoft has not yet named the root cause. Its status updates said servers were failing automated health checks and becoming unavailable, which strained the remaining machines; the extra load was not caused by more traffic. Some servers brought back online became unresponsive again once they received traffic, Ars Technica reported.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.”
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft executive vice president, TechCrunch
Microsoft has promised a full post-incident report with the root cause and its defences once mitigation is complete.
Who was hit
In the UK, parts of the NHS reported serious disruption, with hospital staff turning to paper records, and police forces could not take online crime reports, the Guardian and Wired reported. Japan’s government said its IT systems were disrupted. In the US, a Colorado sheriff’s office could not take online bond payments, school districts told parents to phone instead, and Workhorse Group postponed an earnings call.
Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, told NBC News it looked like one of the biggest outages of all time, Ars Technica reported. Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial 365 subscriptions.
Chi Onwurah, who chairs the UK parliament’s science and technology committee, said the outage showed the dangers of depending on a few providers, Wired reported, as governments in Europe look for alternatives to big US tech firms.
