Microsoft has apologized for a massive, day-long outage that knocked Outlook, Teams and other major online services offline worldwide, blaming the disruption on a technical glitch.
The company said the global outage was not due to an AI or cyber attack.
The tech giant said it is now seeing “broad recovery and stability” after gradually restoring services, following a breakdown that hit countless industries from hospitals and airports to police forces, schools and third-party platforms such as OpenAI.
Microsoft’s workplace tools are among the most used apps in the world, with almost 500 million users, according to the company.
On Friday morning, as the UK and Europe arrived at work, the problems had been stretching on for half a day.
In its latest update, Microsoft said that it had applied updates to affected servers, but that they had not resulted in sustained recovery. There did appear to be more stability in some regions, however.
"We're reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability," Microsoft said. The company added that it was "not aware" of any malicious activity that was causing the outage.
Read MoreMicrosoft outage: How offline preppers are getting ready for a world without internet
Microsoft went down and social media had a field day: ‘Take your time’
I’m a tech expert. This is the likely cause of the global Microsoft outage
Key Points
- Microsoft gives first apology after outages
- Microsoft outage could cost $7 billion
- What caused the Microsoft outage?
- Most affected companies had 'done nothing wrong', expert says
Impacted customers can request credits
19:28 , Alex LangMicrosoft customers impacted by the global outage will be eligible to request credits for their service.
According to Variety, the credits are not automatically applied. Customers must submit a verified request documenting that they were impacted.
Credits are then awarded based on the length of the outage and which services were affected.
Microsoft stock holds steady
19:02 , Alex LangDespite global disruptions from the outage, Microsoft's stock held steady Friday in the U.S.
By midday, the stock was up .26 percent, sitting at roughly $524 a share.
Microsoft stock is up 10.88 percent compared to a year ago, a $51 per share increase over the same period.
Internet has fun after Microsoft outage
18:43 , Alex LangReporter Brendan Rascius has details about how the Microsoft outage caused headache in workplaces, a few social media users had fun with the problem.
He writes:
The general feeling among many internet commenters — who appeared to rely on Microsoft services for their jobs — was one of unbridled euphoria.
One X user captured the mood with a clip from The Whale, in which the main character smiles, levitates and becomes engulfed in white light. “How I look at my coworkers when they told me Microsoft Teams is down,” the user wrote.
On Instagram, one account shared footage of Phil Collins singing “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.” Another posted an image of a chihuahua relaxing in a bubble bath with the caption: “WFH employees right now because Microsoft Outlook is down.”
Microsoft went down and social media had a field day: ‘Take your time’
What happens to emails sent in the outage?
18:18 , Alex LangIf you’re wondering what happens to your emails sent during the outage, don’t worry they haven’t been lost.
According to Tom’s Guide, the emails are just delayed and not lost forever. Email servers will queue them and retry undeliverable messages and not just throw them in the trash.
"To protect email during recovery, we’re continuing to prioritize queue and backlog processing, and the email timeout window has been extended to 48 hours to preserve delayed messages,” Microsoft noted.
Just how widespread is Microsoft use?
17:58 , Alex LangAs Microsoft continues to restore service after a massive outage, the company’s s 365 apps are used by 430 million people.
Those apps include Word, Excel, and Outlook that have become part of may people’s everyday lives.
Microsoft gives first apology after outages
17:30 , Alex LangWe are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.
— Microsoft (@Microsoft) November 13, 2026
This was a technical issue…
Microsoft outage could cost $7 billion
17:20 , Jasmine FernándezLost productivity from the Microsoft outage could approach $7 billion — and that figure is likely to climb, according to a conservative estimate released Friday by Michigan-based Anderson Economic Group.
While roughly 430 million users were affected overall, firm president Patrick Anderson estimates that up to 26 million people on Thursday and 51 million on Friday experienced operational disruptions severe enough to cause real economic loss.
"This is a starting point, with all the limitations on what we know. We don’t know complete scale," he told CNN on Friday.
Microsoft outage is ‘one of the most economically damaging in history’, expert warns
16:01 , Andrew Griffin
Microsoft outage is ‘one of the most economically damaging in history’
Microsoft addresses fears of cyber attack as it says things are still 'improving'
16:00 , Andrew GriffinMicrosoft’s X feed, which it has used to provide updates on the outage, has just sent out another post. This time, it has more specifically addressed the widespread fears that it has been the victim of a cyber attack, and said again that it is seeing improvement in its service.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure,” the post reads. “We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us.
“We will continue to share more information as we have it, and for now we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”
Most affected companies had 'done nothing wrong', expert says
15:42 , Andrew GriffinThe outage is a “stark reminder of how much of modern working life depends on a handful of digital platforms”, says Steven Watt, professor of practice in cybersecurity at the University of St Andrews. And the effects were dramatic – “practical and immediate”, he says – and covering everything from banks, governments, courts, airlines, financial firms and more.
“Most of the organisations affected had done nothing wrong. Many had made sensible, widely recommended decisions to move to the cloud and standardise on a trusted platform. The lesson is not that cloud is unreliable. It is that cloud adoption can quietly change the nature of our risk. When communication, identity, collaboration and, increasingly, AI tools sit with a single provider, a fault in one place can become a failure in thousands. The recovery was not in our hands either. For many customers, the only option was to wait,” Professor Watt said.
“This is a question of resilience rather than technology preference. Organisations should be able to answer some basic questions. Which of our critical processes depend on a single supplier? How long could we operate if that supplier were unavailable? What is our fallback for communicating with staff, customers and regulators? Have we tested it, or do we simply assume it exists? A continuity plan that relies on the same platform that has just failed is not a plan. Remember manual workarounds – these don’t work any more!
“None of this means abandoning the cloud or the companies that provide it. Their investment and capability bring benefits that few organisations could replicate alone and complete independence is neither realistic nor desirable. The aim should be strategic autonomy which is keeping enough choice, portability and operational capability that dependence on any single provider does not become an unacceptable risk. As AI agents begin to act on our behalf inside these same platforms, the stakes will only rise.
“The same principle applies to our personal lives, where the Government’s Be Ready campaign encourages households to plan for disruption to essential services. Digital services now belong in that category. We should plan for their loss in the same way, and this week suggests we should do it sooner rather than later. I’m off to the supermarket...”
Outage highlights danger of 'the lack of resilience in the UK’s digital infrastructure', influential politician says
14:51 , Press AssociationThe chaos caused by the Microsoft outage shows the risk of the UK Government’s dependency on a limited number of foreign technology firms, the chairwoman of an influential Commons committee said.
Whitehall was forced to implement contingency measures in response to global problems with the Outlook email system and Teams messaging and meetings service.
Ministers were briefed on the situation, which affected a wide range of government services.
The Commons Science and Technology Committee has previously highlighted the “strategic and economic vulnerability” of the UK’s reliance on a small number of US-based providers for its digital infrastructure and delivery of public services.
Committee chairwoman Dame Chi Onwurah said: “The global Microsoft outage only serves to highlight once again the lack of resilience in the UK’s digital infrastructure, and the dangers that this dependency can pose to our security, economy and public services.
“My committee’s report on delivering a digital government concluded that the UK is hugely dependent on a small number of US-based technology providers for our public services, preventing homegrown alternatives from developing.
“In its response, the Government could not tell us how much it was spending on IT and digital or who it was spending it with – without even knowing this, how can we protect against vendor lock-in or achieve the resilience and digital sovereignty the UK needs?”
Downing Street said officials were working on Friday to establish the scale of the problem the outage had caused.
The Prime Minister’s deputy spokeswoman said: “We’re working with departments and with Microsoft to establish the full picture, and where services are disrupted, departments have contingency arrangements in place.”
She added: “There are a range of services which are experiencing disruption because, obviously, like many organisations here and around the world, parts of government use these Microsoft services, as do many organisations.
“Frontline services have their own contingency arrangements, and departments are working to make sure essential services keep running.”
Asked if the Government would seek compensation for taxpayers as a result of the loss of services, the spokeswoman said: “I think it’s probably too early to establish that.”
But once the issues had been addressed “it’s right that we look carefully at any lessons, as we would with any incident”.
Microsoft services appear to be online again – even more than usual
14:24 , Andrew GriffinMicrosoft’s online services appear to be running again – even faster than usual, as they race to catch up with what is almost a full day of lost emails. That’s according to data from analysis firm Kentik.
Microsoft’s Exchange Online is back, and then some. After ~19 hours running ~85% below expected, traffic began recovering at 6:20 AM ET (11:20 UTC). By 8:25 AM ET it was running ~19% above expected as queued mail and mailbox syncs caught up. pic.twitter.com/SPv0MH5yJ0
— Doug Madory (also on Bluesky) (@DougMadory) November 13, 2026
That rush to deliver stuck messages was one of the reasons that the problems lasted so long, says Doug Madory, Kentik’s director of internet analysis. Every time Microsoft started to fix the issues, its servers would get hit by more requests than usual (because there was a lot of backlog) and they were less able to respond to them (because its systems were offline).
Why it was hard to fix: devices opened up to 70% more connections to Exchange than expected, while responses from Microsoft fell ~73%. That’s the retry pressure Microsoft described as overwhelming servers once they came back online. pic.twitter.com/jAdvHGOeO3
— Doug Madory (also on Bluesky) (@DougMadory) November 13, 2026
Recovery continuing and reaching 'normal levels', Microsoft says – but it is not fixed
14:19 , Andrew GriffinAnother update has dropped on Microsoft’s X account. It suggests that we are getting back to close to normal – but that there still might be problems or delays.
“We’re continuing to see improvements in service availability, with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels,” it reads.
“Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues. We’ve implemented additional mitigation measures, are restoring remaining affected infrastructure, and are investigating residual service issues while closely monitoring service health and validating recovery across affected connection methods.”
Could the outage last two days?
14:18 , Andrew GriffinThere’s lots of panic on social media (and the actual media) about the fact that the outage might last two days. It all seems to be based on a slightly pessimistic reading of what Microsoft said it was doing about the outage.
In its updates, it has repeatedly made reference to an “extended 48-hour email timeout window”. Usually, Outlook emails are given 24 hours to get to their recipient; if they can’t be delivered in that period, they will time out, get marked as undeliverable and effectively returned to sender.
By extending that window, Microsoft is making sure that any messages that are currently stuck in the system, because it is down, don’t run into that time limit. It should ensure that emails sent during the outage are still able to get to the people they were sent to.
But there is no indication that Microsoft set the 48-hour limit because it expects the outage to last that long; it only indicates that the company worries that emails might not arrive before the usual 24-hour limit is up. We are rapidly approaching that deadline (it is about three hours away), and presumably Microsoft will have wanted to make sure that lost emails didn’t make the outage even more disastrous than it already is.
All that said, there is no real indication of how long exactly the outage will last; even Microsoft seems not to know, having made a number of failed attempts to fix it earlier and now resorting to much more vague suggestions that things are “recovering” rather than giving any specific timelines (see below). The outage could last 48 hours – but the change to the timeout window is no indication that it will, and besides Microsoft probably wouldn’t know at this point whether it will or not.
Problems still remain – but recovery is continuing, says Microsoft
13:41 , Andrew GriffinMicrosoft has released yet another update. It says that it is still recovering – but that issues are still happening, too.
(It has also given an update on the geographical impact, similar to the one below. It’s unclear exactly how the various adjectives – “broader”, “sustained” and “encouraging” – actually compare with each other, but I assume they are listed in order of how good they are.)
“We’re seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific,” the full update, posted on X, reads.
“Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure. Our focus remains on stabilising recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs while we validate service consistency across connection methods.”
Problems may depend where in the world you are
13:20 , Andrew GriffinThe Microsoft outage is global. But the effects appear not to be equally shared, according to Microsoft’s own status pages.
Its wording is not entirely clear, but it suggests that North America is now least affected, followed by Europe, and then Asia Pacific. Here’s the update, from its website:
“We're seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements now observed in North America and sustained improvements across much of Europe. We're also seeing encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, although some users may continue to experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure.”
Outlook traffic is coming back, internet analysis company says
13:02 , Andrew GriffinIt appears that Microsoft’s claim that its services are coming back, and anecdotal reports that people are seeing their emails and other data again, are true. This data from internet analysis company Kentik shows that traffic is coming back – but is still not back to normal.
Exchange Online is finally climbing back. After ~18 hours running about 85% below expected levels, traffic to Microsoft’s email service began rising sharply at 6:20 AM ET (11:20 UTC), the biggest gain we’ve seen since the outage began. pic.twitter.com/S3Dqk5xoL3
— Doug Madory (also on Bluesky) (@DougMadory) November 13, 2026
“The night was rough,” Doug Madory, Kentik’s director of internet analysis, wrote in a follow-up post.
“From about 10 PM to 6:20 AM ET, traffic lurched up and down as Microsoft restarted servers, shifted traffic and blocked some types of it, as described in their status updates. Each attempt brought a little traffic back, and none of them held.”
Outage has now been ongoing for 19 hours
12:55 , Andrew GriffinIt was at 5.54pm UK time that Microsoft first tweeted about the outage, in the post below:
We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026
It’s now 12.54pm UK time. And while Microsoft has said that the problem is getting fixed, it has admitted there are still “intermittent issues”:
We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure. Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue. We’re focused on…
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 13, 2026
UK government hit by outage
12:51 , Andrew GriffinThe UK government is being hit by the Microsoft outage, Downing Street has confirmed. A spokesperson for the prime minister said that some departments had been forced to rely on backup plans to keep their services running – but did not name which, or indicate whether Number 10 had been affected.
The government also stressed that there is no indication the outage came from malicious activity, and pointed to its statements (copied below) that services are gradually stabilising.
Microsoft says it is seeing 'encouraging recovery progress' – but problems continue
12:15 , Andrew GriffinMicrosoft has given yet another update saying that it is seeing things recover but that there’s still may be “intermittent issues”.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” it wrote on X.
“Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue. We’re focused on recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritising email queue and backlog reduction.”
It also says once again that it has extended the “email timeout window” to 48 hours, to ensure that delayed messages are still safe. (Otherwise, emails that haven’t arrived may not actually get there, because the system would assume they are not going to be delivered.)
This is just the latest big outage at a tech company that has caused global chaos in recent times. Here, from Reuters, is a rundown of recent big outages, in reverse chronological order.
MICROSOFT
Outlook, Teams and Copilot were hit by a global outage affecting Microsoft 365 features on Thursday, which had stretched beyond 12 hours by 1100 GMT on Friday. Microsoft blamed server problems and said it was not aware of any malicious activity.
The disruption hit government agencies in Australia, Japan, and the US, and caused disruptions at trading firms, delays to companies publishing their results and airlines warning customers of delayed communication.
Microsoft had also faced an outage with its 365 services in January. In October last year, it reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.
CLOUDFLARE
The web-infrastructure company, whose network handles about a fifth of web traffic, was hit by an outage preventing thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT on November 18, 2025.
The company said the outage was caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats, which grew too large and crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services.
AWS
Amazon's cloud services unit, which hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, was hit by an outage on October 20, 2025, disrupting operations across multiple industries around the world and taking down several popular apps including Reddit and Snapchat.
The disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo offline and halted others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers or changing their airline tickets.
It was at least the third time in five years that AWS's northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown.
CROWDSTRIKE
A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered systems problems for Microsoft customers that resulted in hours-long global computer systems outages on July 19, 2024.
Services from airlines to healthcare, shipping and finance were impacted globally. After the outage was resolved, companies were left dealing with backlogs of delayed and cancelled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that took days to solve.
X CORP
Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on December 28, 2022, leaving tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online.
META
Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on October 4, 2021, with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. Meta said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change.
AKAMAI
Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the US were briefly down on June 17, 2021, due to server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai. According to the firm, the problem was caused by a bug in its software.
FASTLY
In June 2021, thousands of government, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly. The issue affected several high-traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the New York Times, with outages ranging from a few minutes to around an hour.
ALPHABET
Some of Google's most popular services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive were down for an hour during an outage on December 14, 2020. According to outage monitoring website Downdetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were affected in various parts of the world, including the US, Britain and India.
Email appears to be coming back online – slowly
12:05 , Andrew GriffinAnecdotally, it appears that the problems do appear to be lifting. Colleagues are reporting that their email clients are filling back up with messages, for instance.
We’ve not heard anything from Microsoft since the update, below, in which it said that it was making “additional progress toward recovery”, but that “intermittent issues may continue”.
Of course, even when Microsoft’s own services are back online, that won’t be the end of the problem. The effects of the outage are likely to continue – especially since so many organisations rely on the tools, and so will now be behind schedule and perhaps missing deadlines.
(Importantly, though, Microsoft has stressed that the emails themselves should be safe – when the systems are back online, they should come through as usual, if delayed, it has suggested.)
BBC Radio 1 appears to suffer ‘technical glitch’ during Microsoft outage as Charlotte Church plays on repeat
12:02 , Andrew Griffin
BBC Radio 1 appears to suffer ‘technical glitch’ as Charlotte Church plays on repeat
Microsoft outage sparks chaos across NHS, police and schools
11:42 , Andrew GriffinThe effects of the outage are very widespread – in everything from hospitals to the police and schools. Here’s a rundown of how it’s affecting UK organisations.
Microsoft outage sparks chaos across NHS, police and schools
Outage is a reminder that 'the cloud' is a real, physical thing, expert says
11:40 , Andrew GriffinIt’s tempting to think of the cloud as something that lives in the sky. But outages like this are a reminder of the fact it is powered by real computing hardware, with all the limits on resources and physical problems that might bring, one expert has said.
“When people refer to using 'the cloud' it's actually still physical servers, with finite resources,” said Luca Arnaboldi, assistant professor of cyber security in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. “As demand increases, the cloud providers need to balance efficiency, and having spare capacity, with the need to keep things running. Redundancy is a well known concept in dependability.
“In this particular case as servers became unavailable, capacity on the remaining servers increased, leaving fewer machines to handle the traffic. So, without knowing what caused the original outage, if we assume it was already in a state of high demand, they were trying to respond to traffic, higher than usual, with lower than usual resources. So as some of the original services came back, the ones currently under strain now fail, creating a constant catch-up.
“More and more of our work, and services online in general depend on shared infrastructure so something going wrong can spread a lot further, making planning for reliable web services much more difficult. Spare servers only help if they remain usable despite faults affecting others.”
Outage comes at vital time for many businesses, expert warns
11:29 , Andrew GriffinThe outage is largely restricted to email and other Microsoft 365 products. But that does not mean that the effects are: we’ve already heard of problems everywhere from hospitals to airports, and one expert has pointed out that problems with email in businesses can quickly ripple out to other parts of its operations.
“Today’s Microsoft outage is a timely reminder of just how dependent businesses have become on technology. We have spent a significant amount of time focusing on the efficiencies that automation, AI and digital systems bring. Perhaps not enough about what happens when they stop working. As businesses are becoming better at using technology are they also less capable of operating without it,” said Elisa Sofocli, a partner at audit, tax and business advisory firm, Blick Rothenberg.
“Being mid-month when a lot of payroll deadline are, we need to remember payroll like many other processes also rely on information flowing between HR, finance, employees and payroll providers, with approvals and checks along the way. If those communication channels are disrupted, the knock-on effects can extend well beyond an inability to access emails.”
All the major organisations impacted by the Microsoft outage
11:14 , Andrew GriffinThe problems are affecting everything from hospitals to AI firms. Here’s a rundown of how the effects of the outage have spread across the internet and the real world.
All the major organisations impacted by the Microsoft outage
Microsoft says it is seeing more 'progress' towards 'recovery'
11:12 , Andrew GriffinIn its latest update, Microsoft says it is getting closer to having fixed the problem – but that the outage is still not over.
“We’ve made additional progress toward recovery, with actions now completed across portions of affected infrastructure and traffic being gradually restored,” it wrote on X.
“We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue. Our focus is extending these recovery actions across remaining affected infrastructure while continuing stabilization and adding capacity to improve consistency.”
Outage is 'chaos', says experts as he takes 'educated guess' at what has happened
11:06 , Andrew GriffinOne cyber security expert has described the outage as “chaos” as he took a guess at what has happened. He points the blame at a “health check”, a process that confirms whether a server is working as it should be.
“It’s chaos,” said Alan Woodward, professor of cybersecurity at the University of Surrey. “I can guess what’s happened.
“My educated guess, but if I were a betting man I reckon it’ll be a cascade failure to do with the health check, some configuration change internally that triggered it, and progressive inability of other servers to cope with the extra load i.e. a cascading failure. If that’s what’s happened, they will be frantically trying to balance the loads across their servers and find out what triggered the initial health check failure.
“It’s very fluid as Microsoft are not saying great deal. However, what it shows is how dependent so many are on the Microsoft server estate working properly. It has all sorts of knock on effects such as when a system sends you a code to log in via your email.”
Outage shows danger of bundling different products together, expert says
10:59 , Andrew GriffinThe current outage shows the danger of bundling services together – Outlook, for instance, is both an email hosting service and also a range of other products, so that a problem with once can quickly become widespread. It is better instead to connect different products through open standards, which reduces people and companies’ reliance on just one specific provider – which can, as we have seen, go down and quickly ripple out.
That’s according to Rob Mueller, founder, director and chief technical officer at Fastmail. (His company offers exactly this kind of service, letting people host their email separately and working with open standards, so it’s probably helpful to bear that bias in mind.)
"Modern productivity suites are more and more bundled as all-in-one. Email, calendar, chat, documents and identity are sold together and, crucially, built on top of each other. Tight integration is convenient on a good day, but on a bad day, it means failures cascade,” he said.
“The alternative is to connect independent products through open standards, rather than relying on one proprietary stack. Email is the original example of this. It was built as a federated system, where any provider can talk to any other. Your mail, calendar and contacts can live with one provider, be read in another company's app, and connect to a chat tool or file store from a third. Each piece can be chosen on its merits, and each piece can fail without taking the others down.
“A distributed ecosystem gives you a smaller blast radius on any failures, resilience through diversity of suppliers and your choice of tools rather than what one provider dictates. You also get real portability because your data sites in open formats behind open protocols, so you can move, back up or mirror it however you want.”
Microsoft says recovery is 'ongoing' – but it may take some time
10:53 , Andrew GriffinMicrosoft says that it is seeing some improvement in service – but that recovery is “ongoing”, and it has suggested that it might not be fixed for some time.
“Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases,” it posted on X.
“We’re seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline. To protect delayed mail, we’ve extended the email timeout window to 48 hours while queue and backlog processing continues
What caused the Microsoft outage? Update issued with Outlook and Teams down
10:44 , Andrew GriffinHere’s the latest on what we know about why this outage happened. In short: not much, but it doesn’t appear to be a cyber attack – though security experts say that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry.
The world is being hit by one of its biggest ever outages. Here’s how it happened
Redundancy and resilience are experts' key warnings
10:17 , Andrew GriffinExperts’ two big takeaways from this huge outage are two things: resilience, to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, and redundancy, to ensure that businesses’ and others who rely on this kind of technology have somewhere else to go if it does. Here’s one representative example.
“When things like this Microsoft outage happen, people immediately start looking for workarounds just to keep things moving, and that means switching to tools and systems that aren't the ones normally used or approved by organisations,” said Micheal Axelsen from the University of Queensland.
“Organisations need to be careful with what people are doing now, when their usual systems are down, and what tools and programs people are using, as that introduces a potential risk. The other concern is what happens when systems come back.
“Organisations should consider having approved back-up systems in place and a level of redundancy to ensure people can switch to alternative systems and programs without risk."”
Investors may worry after repeated Microsoft outages
10:10 , Andrew GriffinJosh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, said investors would likely look past the outage but that repeated disruptions could hurt Microsoft over time.
"I think investors will take this in their stride for now, because very few of these customers can realistically walk away from the Microsoft ecosystem overnight," Gilbert said.
"The bigger worry is that this isn’t the first 365 outage this year, and 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. The market will want to see Microsoft prove it can keep the lights on before it asks customers to spend more on Copilot."
Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and also in October last year.
Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.
Microsoft is taking actions to secure emails that are stuck in the outage
09:34 , Andrew GriffinAn update on Microsoft’s status page says that it is working to ensure that any emails that might currently be stuck because of the outage are not lost. Or, in its own slightly more technical terms: “Network and traffic-management actions remain in progress, and we continue to prioritise backlog and queue health to preserve delayed mail during recovery”.
Outage means Microsoft can't keep IT professionals up to date on outage
09:30 , Andrew GriffinIn a curious consequence of the outage, the technical issues mean that Microsoft can’t tell IT professionals about the technical issues themselves. At least not in the normal way.
A note on its status page makes clear that Microsoft is sharing updates there because administrators might not be able to log in as usual. “Information about this issue is posted on this page because Microsoft 365 administrators may be unable to access the admin center to get Service health information.”
Outage appears to be bad code rather than a cyber attack, expert says
09:07 , Andrew GriffinExperts across the security industry are stressing that this doesn’t appear to be the result of a cyber attack or any other security incident – but instead a mistake by Microsoft itself. As well as other things, that probably means that data won’t be loss and the main problem will be inconvenience.
“Rather than a cyber attack, most likely this was caused by an update to software which contained a bug,” said Tom Worthington, honorary senior lecturer in the School of Computing at the Australian National University. “It is unlikely there will be a loss of data, just inconvenience as systems are manually rolled back to the last good copy of the software. This is a useful reminder not to be dependent on one mobile phone company, or email service.”
Outage shows the danger of relying on one company, and failing to be resilient
08:25 , Andrew GriffinExperts are warning that this is a reminder of exactly why companies shouldn’t rely to heavily on going fully digital – or at least doing so with one company.
"With so much of the world's tech landscape reliant on a handful of giants, when one fails it can quickly evolve into a global IT blackout. Services from email to AI virtual assistants connected to Microsoft can stall for users, grinding many organisations to a halt,” said Jake Moore, global cybersecurity adviser at ESET.
"This kind of outage is exactly why services haven't become fully digital. For now, affected users who need to contact someone should rely on alternate forms of communication like phone calls. For big tech firms, this is yet another lesson on the importance of cyber resilience and having fallback plans in place for when critical servers fail."
Government working with Microsoft to assess outage impact
08:18 , Athena StavrouThe government is working with Microsoft to assess the impact of the hours long outage affecting Outlook and Teams.
Luke Pollard, the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry told Times Radio government engineers are working with the company to confirm whether any government systems had been affected.
“So we’re looking across government, forgive me. This is not a portfolio that I am responsible for, but the understanding that I have from Downing Street on this is that government systems are being looked at in relation to Microsoft,” he said.
“There’ll be lots of people who are trying to access their work systems and their systems every day who will be deeply frustrated by this. I get that frustration. That’s why we’ve already been in touch with Microsoft. The dialogue between our cyber resilience teams across government and Microsoft continues. I want to see this fixed. It’s on Microsoft to do so. I hope they can get there very soon.”
I’m a tech expert. This is the likely cause of the global Microsoft outage
08:13 , Andrew GriffinHere’s an article into looking what’s gone wrong – and what we need to do about it.
I’m a tech expert. This is the likely cause of the global Microsoft outage
Microsoft says it is 'not aware' of any hack
07:56 , Andrew GriffinIn a message posted on its status page, Microsoft said that is “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”. That is different of course from saying it definitely doesn’t involve any kind of cyber attack – but indicates there is at least no evidence for it
“We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution,” it said. “Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defense-in-depth repair items, and more within a Post-Incident Report.”
Not a cyber attack, Australia says
07:50 , Andrew GriffinAustralian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said that Microsoft believed it was not dealing with a cyberattack.
"They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke said at a press conference.
"The impact that they are dealing with ... is very much on email systems," the minister added.
Australia's spy agency and federal police were among organizations caught up in the outage on Friday.
The CrowdStrike malfunction of 2024 was one of the largest internet disruptions, hobbling technology systems in hospitals, banks, and airports, highlighting the vulnerability of the world's interconnected technologies.
Hello and welcome...
07:23 , Andrew Griffin... to our live coverage of an outage across Microsoft’s workplace products.
