A global Microsoft outage This week, email and other work tools were disrupted, throwing business discussions and daily services into global disarray and highlighting the risks of relying on one of the few major providers of critical technology.
Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot, have been disrupted. As the outage entered its second day on Friday, Microsoft said it had seen “encouraging recovery progress.” But the company also warned that “intermittent access issues or delays in email delivery” might persist for some users.
“We know that our customers rely on our services to accomplish important tasks every day and regret the impact these outages have had on those who depend on us,” Microsoft wrote. in a social media update.
These disruptions are the latest example of the cascading problems that can arise when so many people communication and technology platforms depend on the same supplier. Some lawmakers outside the United States have also argued that the outage shows the consequences of overreliance on American technology.
“With no inbound and outbound emails, many office workers feel like they’re experiencing a virtual snow day,” said Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science.
Still, he added, “this issue highlights the dependence we have built on an enterprise’s digital infrastructure and may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem.”
The global reach of the outage was rapid. After problems first appeared Thursday at noon In the United States, online tracker Downdetector said it had received outage reports from 74 countries and territories. in an hour.
The total number of people affected is unclear, but Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services.
Microsoft rushed to recover services
A series of Microsoft 365 messages on X suggested that its engineers had struggled to get a handle on the problem for some time, teasing drawing other companies and other users. But the tech giant said there was “no indication” that the disruptions were caused by malicious activity, specifically noting Friday that the outage was not linked to a cyberattack or artificial intelligence agents.
Microsoft said a technical issue occurred during an upgrade following “a recent network change”. The company added that it restored services gradually, which took longer.
As Microsoft resolved issues affecting its Exchange Online mailboxes, it previously cited a failure that it said caused a number of its servers to become unexpectedly unavailable during automated checks.
For Outlook, many users reported that they were unable to send and receive emails, or had trouble loading their inbox. These problems have been building up across much of the world through Friday.
On Friday morning in the United States, Microsoft said email queues were “significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.” Still, he warned of potential intermittent access and continued delays.
On Thursday, the company said it had “successfully restored” Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.
Disruptions piled up from courtroom to pharmacy prescriptions
In Britain, the outage ended a trial in Manchester. Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home due to delays that he said illustrated the danger of the court’s reliance on technology.
The UK government said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services, but that “robust contingency plans” were in place to minimize disruption.
British police said they were unable to receive reports of online crime and urged people to phone with any urgent inquiries. The outage also affected some law enforcement agencies in the United States. The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado, for example, note that online bail payments have been affected.
Also in Britain, the National Pharmacy Association has warned customers about delays in getting medicines. The outage affected the National Health Service and threatened to prevent doctors from emailing prescriptions to pharmacies.
“Please be patient with your pharmacy teams today, where waits may be longer than normal and there may be delays for some prescriptions,” a spokesperson said.
The governments of Singapore, Japan, Greece and Norway also said the outage was affecting some of their operations, including email communications from some ministries or agencies.
And of course, businesses have been rocked by disruption. Hong Kong businessman Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum company, said his company could not receive updates from its U.S. customers through Outlook. If the situation drags on, the problems could “impact the production schedule,” he said.
Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also experienced disruption.
OpenAI and Anthropic also reported connection issues with Microsoft 365 tools, highlighting the ripple effects of more people using artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.
Outage has parallels with 2024 shutdown
Some have drawn parallels with the CrowdStrike outage of 2024which arises from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. The outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers.
Western European governments and institutions, in particular, have attempted to reduce their dependence on the services provided by some large American technology services in their ongoing effort for “digital sovereignty”. This week’s outage renewed some of those calls.
British lawmaker Chi Onwurah, who chairs Parliament’s science and technology committee, said the Microsoft outage “only highlights once again the lack of resilience of the UK’s digital infrastructure and the dangers this dependence can pose to our security, economy and public services.”
She said her committee had previously warned that the UK was “extremely dependent” on a small number of US-based technology providers providing services, preventing the development of local alternatives.
Florian Druckenthaner, a spokesman for Germany’s Ministry of Digitalization, said the government agency responsible for IT security believes German businesses have been largely affected, but no major disruptions have been reported at the government level.
Regardless, Druckenthaner said, the outage shows “the importance of creating layoffs and alternatives. We’re working on that.”
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Associated Press journalists Adam Schreck in Bangkok; Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia; Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi; Mayuko Ono in Tokyo; Geir Moulson in Berlin; Menalaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia; and Pan Pylas and Brian Melley in London contributed.
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