A massive Microsoft outage that began on Thursday afternoon stretched past the 12-hour mark into Friday, leaving millions of users across 74 countries without access to Outlook email, Teams, and other essential workplace tools.
The disruption, which Microsoft attributed to “elevated load” on its infrastructure, affected Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft Defender XDR, among other services . At its peak, outage reports for Outlook exceeded 138,000 on Downdetector, while Microsoft 365 recorded more than 46,000 complaints .
According to Downdetector, outage reports “reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour,” with significant impact reported in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa .
The disruption paralyzed operations across multiple sectors:
In Australia, schools, courts, and government services started their Friday morning with Outlook and other apps out of service . Japan’s government ministries and agencies were unable to send emails through most of the workday, with employees resorting to creating physical copies of documents . New Zealand’s foreign ministry confirmed its ability to receive emails was affected, impacting all its embassies and consulates worldwide .
In Hong Kong, bankers at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs told CNN their work was disrupted, with one noting there was “probably millions of backlog to process” . In Taiwan, fund management operations at securities firms, life insurers, and investment trusts were impacted, with one company canceling a scheduled bond repurchase transaction .
Indian carriers IndiGo and Akasa Air reported disruptions to their email support services, though neither reported flight disruptions . South African carrier CemAir also cited system disruptions .
Detroit-based electric vehicle manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed its Q3 earnings call to November 16, citing business disruptions .
Microsoft initially said it was investigating issues “in the Americas,” but later confirmed the problem could affect “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region” .
In a status update late Thursday, Microsoft said its investigation found that “a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests” . The company said it was preparing a configuration change to address the behavior and was reverting a recent network configuration change that correlated with the start of the impact .
However, by early Friday, Microsoft acknowledged it had not achieved a “sustained recovery.”
“We’re observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren’t resulting in sustained recovery,” the company said .
Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna confirmed late Thursday that there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity” . Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft told him they believed they were dealing with an update that “has gone awry,” similar to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident .
The outage reignited concerns about the global economy’s reliance on a handful of tech giants.
“If one of those firms suffers a major outage, it has the potential to dramatically reduce business productivity globally during the outage time,” Professor Toby Murray of the University of Melbourne told CNN, describing Outlook and Teams as “critical global business infrastructure” .
Technology journalist Jacob Ward said the “ripple effects” could “go on and on,” noting that not only were people’s emails down, but also “the systems they rely on to protect themselves from email based attacks” .
The incident also prompted banks to warn customers about potential scams. Standard Chartered Singapore, ING Australia, and Bank of Queensland all issued alerts urging customers to be wary of phishing attempts and fraudulent tech support calls exploiting the outage .
The outage is the latest in a series of Microsoft service disruptions in 2026. The company experienced a Microsoft 365 outage in January and an Azure cloud failure in October that affected multiple industries . The recurring incidents have raised questions about the reliability of Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure, which underpins much of the global digital economy.
