A widespread Microsoft outage entered a second day Friday, disrupting Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services across multiple regions and forcing hospitals, police departments, schools, government agencies and businesses to activate backup procedures.
The disruption began Thursday evening and spread from the United States into the Asia-Pacific region and Europe as Friday’s workday began. Microsoft said it was seeing early signs of improved server stability after applying a configuration patch, but service degradation continued and a full restoration time had not been announced.
What services are affected?
Users reported problems with Outlook email, Teams, Exchange Online, Microsoft 365 web applications, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do and Copilot-linked services. Downdetector, which relies on user-submitted reports, recorded an Outlook peak approaching 140,000 reports across 74 countries. That figure reflects reports rather than the total number of customers affected.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to server capacity and authentication or routing configuration problems. The company said it was not aware of malicious activity causing the incident and was treating restoration as an urgent priority.
Hospitals, police and governments report disruption
The impact extended well beyond personal email. Health organizations in the United Kingdom reported widespread difficulty accessing Outlook and Teams. Some National Health Service staff turned to paper records, while affected clinics told patients to call rather than email because messages might not arrive.
Several British police forces also asked residents to use telephone lines for time-sensitive reports after online forms and general email addresses became unreliable. Emergency calls remained available. Schools and universities advised families to phone attendance information instead of relying on email.
In Australia, the national intelligence agency and federal police were among organizations reporting problems, while government officials said Microsoft was prioritizing restoration for life-safety and public-sector services. Japan’s government email systems were disrupted, prompting some agencies to use text messaging and other analog workarounds. Businesses from shipping to pharmaceuticals shifted orders and customer contacts to phone lines.
The outage also affected technology firms that rely on Microsoft connectivity, including integrations used by OpenAI and Anthropic, illustrating how a failure in one major cloud platform can ripple across otherwise separate services.
Microsoft says a patch is helping
Microsoft reported “positive results” after applying a patch to part of its infrastructure and said it was expanding the change to servers supporting active regions. Even so, the company continued to list service degradation for business, enterprise and consumer products.
The company has not yet published a final root cause. Microsoft said it plans to provide a post-incident report after the outage is mitigated.
What users should do now
- For urgent medical, public-safety or school matters, use the organization’s published telephone number rather than email.
- Check the official Microsoft service status page or your organization’s IT notice before repeatedly retrying.
- Do not assume that an email or online form was delivered unless you received confirmation.
- Be cautious of phishing messages that claim to offer outage fixes, password resets or restoration links.
Microsoft’s recovery work was continuing Friday morning. The incident remained the day’s highest-impact technology story because it affected essential services as well as millions of workers and consumers. Live updates and institutional impact reports were also being tracked by The Guardian and other international outlets.
