Global Microsoft outage leaves Outlook and Teams down on Thursday and Friday

A global outage of Microsoft services disrupted work for many organisations around the world on Thursday and Friday. According to the monitoring service Downdetector, reports of problems came in from 74 countries and territories within about an hour.

The problems affected Outlook email, the Teams messaging app, the Microsoft 365 suite and Copilot tools. According to money.pl, more than 430 million people use Microsoft 365, but it is not known how many of them were actually affected. Banks, courts and government bodies are among the institutions reported as hit. Poland's mBank also said it was having serious difficulties with email correspondence with its customers.

Causes and the company's response

Vice-president Charles Lamanna wrote on X that nothing suggested the outage was caused by malicious activity or a cyber attack. Microsoft paused the rollout of new updates, redirected traffic away from the affected infrastructure and restarted servers. The company also extended the email timeout limit to 48 hours. According to PolsatNews, this means the mail server waits longer for a message before returning an error.

On Thursday, Microsoft initially reported positive results from its recovery work, but a few hours later said there had been no lasting improvement. On Friday afternoon the company reported gradual improvement, but gave no date for full restoration. It said it regretted the disruption caused to customers.

United Kingdom

According to money.pl, the outage affected health services and schools in the UK, as well as other public bodies, including the Bank of England, which reported email problems. Notices on the websites of British hospitals and councils said that emails could not be sent or received because of the outage, and that responses to correspondence might be delayed.

What this means for you

The outage also affected organisations in the UK that use Microsoft 365. People who work with or contact such organisations may have experienced delays in receiving replies to emails. The sources do not report any impact on individual customers or personal accounts.