The global Microsoft 365 outage that crippled email, messaging and productivity tools for millions of users worldwide has entered its second day, with the tech giant reporting only “early signs of stabilisation” as at midday on Friday.
The disruption, which started on Thursday evening around 20:26 (SA time), has now lasted more than 17 hours with no clear timeline for when services will be fully restored.
Microsoft’s latest update this morning confirmed that while recovery efforts are showing “positive results”, the company is still working to restart affected servers across multiple regions. Over 430 million people who use Microsoft 365 apps remain affected by the outage.
Services still down
Email service Outlook, collaboration tool Teams, cloud storage OneDrive, and file-sharing platform SharePoint remain partially or fully inaccessible for many users. Business tools including Microsoft Copilot 365, Defender, Planner, To Do, Intune and Power BI are also affected.
Consumer services hit include Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web.
Downdetector registered nearly 130 000 outage reports from 74 countries and territories, with Outlook alone peaking at around 140 000 complaints.
What went wrong
Microsoft traced the problem to a process on its servers that handles secure connections. This process became overwhelmed and caused servers to stop responding to requests.
The company linked the failure to a recent network configuration change that happened just before the outage began. Microsoft has ruled out cyberattacks as the cause.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, confirmed the company is “not aware of any malicious activity” behind the disruption. Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke compared it to the CrowdStrike incident earlier this year, describing it as “an update that has gone awry”.
Recovery setbacks
Microsoft’s attempts to fix the problem have hit several obstacles. On Thursday night, the company reported “positive results” after restarting affected infrastructure, but by early Friday morning it warned that changes “aren’t taking as expected”.
Servers that were brought back online became unresponsive again once traffic returned to them. This forced Microsoft to limit the types of traffic going to affected servers and roll back to an earlier software configuration on some systems.
By Friday morning, Microsoft said it was applying a software patch that showed promising results for server stability. The company is now gradually expanding this patch to servers in active regions while slowly reintroducing traffic in specific locations.
Global disruption
The outage has disrupted government services, businesses and essential infrastructure across multiple continents.
In the United Kingdom, police forces, NHS services and schools using cloud-based systems have been affected. GP practices told patients to phone rather than use email or online forms.
Australia invoked a clause in its digital resilience agreement with Microsoft, asking the company to prioritise the country’s interests in recovery efforts. Australian federal police, security services, the taxation office and some courts have been hit by the disruption. Long-distance schools closed for the day, while retailer Coles reported its internal email system was down.
Japanese government administration faced communications problems, though Chief Government Spokesperson Minoru Kihara said no incidents occurred at healthcare facilities. Singapore’s government also confirmed it was affected.
Electric vehicle maker Workhorse postponed its earnings call to Monday because of the outage. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with tools that link their services to Microsoft 365.
What happens next
Microsoft has not provided an estimated time for full restoration of services. The company said it continues to apply validated configuration changes across affected servers, revert the problematic network configuration change, and gradually restore traffic in specific locations.
Users experiencing problems are advised to check Microsoft’s service health status page at status.cloud.microsoft for updates. Azure cloud services remain unaffected by the outage.
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