A widespread Microsoft service failure disrupted work and school routines across the globe, cutting users off from Outlook email, Teams meetings and other everyday office tools.
The outage had no fast fix. By 3:30 a.m. GMT on Friday, service problems remained extensive and were affecting millions of people. Microsoft kept users updated through posts on X and its “service health status” page.
At 1:59 a.m. GMT, the company said it was seeing “positive results” from efforts to restart affected infrastructure and restore server availability in an isolated way. But by 3:13 a.m. GMT, Microsoft reported that changes meant to improve service were not performing as expected. It said it was looking for alternative approaches to add capacity amid “sustained traffic management imbalances”—an update that left many users confused.
For anyone unable to send or receive Outlook email, that was the reason.
The disruption dragged on for many hours and produced mixed reactions. Some U.S. office workers treated the email blackout as an early start to the weekend. Others switched to Slack, phone calls or face-to-face conversations and barely missed a beat. But as the outage stretched beyond an hour or two after beginning around noon on the U.S. East Coast, it caused serious problems.
Microsoft 365 services tied to Exchange Online and email were affected, including Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Microsoft 365 and Copilot AI. Small businesses rushed to find alternatives for communication, and local governments told residents to call rather than email.
In Australia, Friday opened with Microsoft’s cloud unresponsive. Court live feeds went down, and schools texted parents asking them to phone in absences until email systems returned. The national broadcaster ABC reported that some people missed job interviews because they could not join virtual meetings, and that distribution centers supplying supermarkets faced some supply issues.
Microsoft initially said the connection problems were occurring “in the Americas,” but it soon became clear the outage was global. Downdetector recorded a peak of 130,000 reports about Outlook outages—a figure that likely understated the true scale, since most affected users do not file reports. Report volume slowed as the U.S. business day ended.
Around that time, Microsoft said some servers were back online, but many users still had only intermittent email access. In a post at 10:09 p.m. GMT, the company said its actions had “not provided the anticipated relief.” Microsoft sought to reassure customers that it was taking every possible step to restore service. A later update, however, warned that returned servers could become unresponsive again once they received traffic—meaning Outlook was down once more.