Microsoft has expressed it is “deeply sorry” for a massive service outage that impacted millions of users, businesses, and government organizations worldwide. The company confirmed it has now “addressed the underlying issue,” which stemmed from a technical configuration error rather than a cyber-attack or AI-related malfunction. The outage has affected businesses and organisations across the world that use Microsoft products. According to hospitals and health clinics were affected, although the Australian Medical Association on Friday, Had been no impacts for patient care.
The disruption, which began on Thursday evening, persisted for approximately 18 hours before systems started to recover just before midday GMT on Friday. Microsoft emphasized that it is bringing services back online in a controlled, gradual manner to ensure long-term stability. By Friday morning, the company reported that email queues were significantly reduced and trending toward normal operational levels.
The scale of the outage was substantial, as Microsoft 365 apps support over 430 million users, while more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on the company’s Copilot AI chatbot. Monitoring site Down Detector saw reports of issues spike around 6pm GMT on Thursday, with nearly 130,000 users documenting failures across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. According to the outage website Down Detector showed an increase in Microsoft 365 problems at about 6pm GMT on Thursday, with nearly 130,000, Of problems in 74 countries affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Microsoft has suggested the outage may have been caused by problems with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 up and running. According to anthropic, It had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector. The US House’s chief administrative officer that handles IT for the chamber sent out a “campus-wide alert” to staffers on Thursday about the outage, Politico reported. “If you lose part of that pool, then all of the users are trying to access the remaining servers, and that overloads them.
Beyond internal services, the failure impacted external AI providers, including OpenAI and Anthropic, which noted problems with their Microsoft-reliant connectors. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice-president of Copilot, stated that the firm regrets the disruptions and worked urgently to resolve the technical faults. According to openAI, It was investigating a problem with Microsoft connectors in which new connections might be broken and tools were not working as expected.
Government and public infrastructure sectors were heavily hit. In the United Kingdom, healthcare providers, police forces, and schools faced significant operational hurdles, with many urging the public to contact them via telephone rather than digital channels. National Rail warned passengers that email-delivered tickets might be inaccessible during the incident. In the UK, healthcare systems were disrupted and several British police forces urged people not to try to report crimes online and to phone them in instead. Some schools in the UK notified parents that reporting attendance or absence issues had to be done via phone. Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
In the United States, congressional offices and municipal entities—including the City of Tampa—reported widespread difficulties. Including the City of Tampa, Florida, posted notices on their municipal websites to say that they were affected by the outage, multiple cities.
Law enforcement agencies in Colorado struggled to process bond payments due to the outage, forcing an immediate pivot to in-person transactions. Similarly, international businesses reported significant challenges: Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air saw email support collapse, while Japanese firms like Sagawa Express and Taisho were forced to revert to manual phone ordering systems.
Financial institutions and security firms in Taiwan also confirmed disruptions to fund management operations, and global markets saw some portfolio managers unable to access essential trading platforms. In Australia, risk advisory firm RSM Australia estimated that the total economic impact could reach billions of dollars, as national security agencies and medical services struggled to maintain normal communications.
Mark Gregory, an associate professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, suggested the event appeared rooted in the network layer of Microsoft’s infrastructure. He drew comparisons to the 2023 Optus network failure, explaining that configuration errors often force traffic onto a reduced pool of servers, leading to a cascading overload. He advised that organizations relying on cloud suites like Microsoft 365 should maintain robust backup procedures for critical operations.
While Microsoft noted that this incident follows a previous outage on the Azure cloud platform last month, the company remains focused on stabilizing its current environment. Following the news, Microsoft shares saw a minor decline of 1.1% on Wall Street, closing at $516.86 as investors monitored the recovery progress. Shares in Microsoft dipped slightly, down 1.1% at $516.86, when stock market trading opened on Wall Street.
