Problem affects businesses, government agencies and even tech firm’s own employees
Microsoft scrambles to fix global outage affecting Teams and Outlook
Microsoft outage – live updates
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Millions of people were unable to access their emails, Teams chats or meetings on Thursday night and Friday after a Microsoft 365 outage brought down services across the globe.
The outage has lasted for more than 21 hours, with meaningful signs of recovery visible beginning shortly before midday GMT on Friday. It affected businesses, government agencies and even Microsoft employees all over the world. Those reporting issues have included the US House of Representatives, an Australian spy agency, airlines in India, European government agencies, and police services, ambulances and hospitals in the UK.
Microsoft is still investigating the cause of the outage, which it has said is not a cyber-attack but a configuration error. While the effects of the incident are global, they are also patchy; some users are still able to access some aspects of Microsoft’s service, and service is resuming in some parts of the world faster than in others. Microsoft said it continued to see improvements, with “email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels”, but some users may still experience issues.
Experts say that the outage has laid bare the dangerous dependence of countries such as the UK on a few US tech companies.
What happened and why – and what does it say about online services in 2026?
At about 6pm GMT on Thursday, the outage website Down Detector showed an increase in users reporting issues with Microsoft 365, the suite of cloud software that includes Teams, Word Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
The outage has lasted for more than 21 hours at the time of reporting, with significant recovery beginning at 11:20 GMT on Friday, according to data shared by the research firm Infoblox.
By Friday morning, Microsoft had narrowed down most of the problems to Microsoft Exchange, the email service behind Outlook. Teams meetings and chats had returned to service.
By midday UK time, Microsoft said there was “encouraging recovery progress in Europe”, improvements in North America and Asia Pacific, and Japan was “stable”.
Microsoft has said that this was not the result of a cyber-attack, though suspicions were high because of a number of cyber-attacks that have hit organisations in Europe in recent weeks. So far, the problem appeared to be a configuration update that resulted in some servers becoming overloaded and taken offline, Microsoft indicated.
When the company attempted to apply a fix, servers that had come back online again became unresponsive when traffic began returning to them.
As some servers went down, traffic was funnelled on to the remaining servers, causing traffic problems for those remaining online.
To understand what was bringing down the servers, the company began limiting the traffic that could reach affected servers in specific locations, and on some servers rolled back to an earlier software configuration to see if it fixed the problem.
More details are likely to emerge over the coming weeks. “We don’t know what actually went wrong, and that will take weeks to discover,” said Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at University College London. “The people who are working on it are too busy fixing to understand or report on the cause.”
Murdoch said there was likely to be a proper postmortem on an outage of this size, but not for a few weeks.
An outage that runs for so long for a service as critical as Microsoft 365 is unusual. The company has not said why it has lasted this long, but a clue might be in its updates: as servers returned to being unresponsive after being fixed, engineers had to work through alternative solutions, taking longer than expected to get servers back up and running.
Murdoch said an outage of this size was usually “the result of some surprising interaction between systems. Each of the systems is normally quite well understood but interactions between them are complex and frequently the cause of large outages like this.
“It’s very hard to build a complex system without there being some risk of some failure.”
In the UK, police services, the Bank of England, vital health services – such as ambulances and the NHS – and schools have been affected. In Australia, many people who rely on Microsoft 365 were reporting being unable to access their inboxes, including at councils, state and federal government agencies, courts and schools.
Across Europe, government agencies in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France reported issues, with a French municipality instructing residents to phone instead in case of need.
In Japan, government services and private companies were widely affected, with some employees saying they were switching back to sending faxes. The shipping company Sagawa Express said it was unable to accept online reservations for some of its services at airports and railway stations, while Taisho, a big pharmaceutical company, said it was having to handle orders by phone.
In the US, a court in Maine, the US House of Representatives, and cities in Colorado and Florida were among those reporting issues.
The UK government said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, adding that there were “robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption”.
The NHS, which in England has a five-year deal to use Microsoft 365, said a range of services had been disrupted.
The Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected, and Taiwanese security firms, life insurers and investment trust companies said fund management services had been disrupted.
UK politicians and experts have said that outages such as this underscored the world’s reliance on cloud services provided by a few massive US tech companies – Amazon, Google and Microsoft. This reliance has been a growing source of unease through each high-profile outage. It has grown more pronounced because of the hostility of the Trump administration towards Europe, which has prompted some governments to consider alternatives to US software.
As the name Microsoft 365 implies, the world has quickly become accustomed to online services being available 24/7. Given software is no longer solely downloaded to individual PCs but is also stored on a server owned by a company, outages such as this will happen. Most of the time they are brief but sometimes they are not.
Outages in recent years from telecommunications providers, from the PHP incident to the Crowdstrike incident, show just how varied the sources and causes of a massive outage can be.
There are many different pieces of the puzzle keeping services online – but the effect of one of those services going down is much greater than it ever has been.
Mark Gregory, an associate professor at Australia’s RMIT University, said it was important for organisations to thoroughly test updates before rolling them out to the live network. That was in addition to the extra security testing companies must carry out to ensure their services are protected from threat actors armed with AI tools that can find vulnerabilities quicker than ever before.
Gregory said companies that relied on services such as Microsoft 365 should have backup options such as Google’s Gmail in the event of an outage. Others have suggested the free and open-source Office alternative LibreOffice.
Around the world, it has become increasingly clear that many companies – and government services – do not have good backups, with businesses resorting to faxes and phones.
The Forrester analyst Dario Maisto said the outage “represents the perfect quasi-natural experiment for stress testing an organisation’s – and even an entire continent’s – digital sovereignty posture”, forcing governments to consider what might happen if mailing services and key tools such as Copilot were interrupted.