Microsoft outage drags into a second day, disrupting businesses and governments worldwide
The disruption has affected Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services for more than 12 hours, hitting companies, airlines, hospitals and government offices across several countries. Microsoft says it is gradually restoring service but has yet to explain what caused the outage.
A widespread outage affecting Microsoft's online services has now lasted more than 12 hours, with the company still struggling to fully restore service or explain the cause of the disruption. The outage has primarily affected business and government users.
The disruption began on Thursday and affected Microsoft 365, the company's suite of online productivity services. Users experienced interruptions to Outlook, its email service, Teams, its video-conferencing platform, and Copilot, its AI chatbot. On Friday morning, Microsoft reported that Teams and Copilot had returned to normal operation. However, problems with Outlook and other enterprise applications persisted.
In its latest update, issued Friday at 1:04 p.m. Israel time, Microsoft said it was making gradual progress toward restoring full service, with improvements across several areas.
"We have made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region," the company stated. It added that "traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues."
The cause of the outage remains unknown and may only become clear after Microsoft has fully restored service and completed an investigation. Similar disruptions in the past have been attributed to a range of factors, including faulty software updates, either from Microsoft or one of its service providers, and hardware problems within server infrastructure.
Microsoft has ruled out a cyberattack as the cause, saying it had found no evidence of malicious activity.
The outage has disrupted government services and business operations in the U.S., the European Union, Australia, Japan and other countries. The effects ranged from interruptions to the daily operations of publicly traded companies and delays in quarterly financial reports to warnings from airlines about communication-related delays.
In Europe, stock exchange operator Euronext said its listing teams had experienced email disruptions. British insurer Aviva reported that it had to implement a contingency plan for its quarterly analyst call, while Danish shipping company Maersk warned customers of delays in receiving emails and updates.
In the U.S., OpenAI and Anthropic encountered difficulties accessing Microsoft services. Airlines including Air India, Alaska Airlines and IndiGo reported that their email-based customer service channels had been affected. Financial management and insurance companies in Taiwan also reported disruptions to their systems..
Government agencies were also affected. The U.S. House of Representatives said the outage had disrupted services for some users and that it was working with Microsoft to resolve the issue. The Japanese government reported disruptions to its information systems, while intelligence and police agencies in Australia also experienced problems.
In the UK, several schools asked parents to contact them by phone because their email systems were unavailable. Unity Health hospital in Toronto similarly asked patients to get in touch by phone, saying it could not send or receive emails. In one particularly consequential case, the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office said the outage had left its detention center unable to receive emails or process bail payments for detainees.
"When email and file-sharing tools rely on the same infrastructure, a single failure can disrupt an entire workday," said Eyal Ron, VP of R&D at Eon. "It is important to distinguish between a temporary disruption in accessing information and the loss of the data itself. Therefore, organizations must ensure they have a secure, separate backup that allows access to data even when the cloud service is unavailable. The true test of a recovery plan is whether teams can access critical information and continue working during an outage, something that should be practiced in advance."
The outage also raises broader questions about Microsoft's reliability and the longer-term implications for its business. It is the third major disruption affecting Microsoft 365 services in the past 13 months, following similar incidents in January 2026 and October 2025. Microsoft's Azure cloud service also suffered an outage last month that affected its performance.
