Millions of people around the world woke up Friday to find they could not get into their work email or chat tools. A global outage affecting Microsoft services, including Outlook and Teams, began overnight and continued into Friday morning in the United States, with effects reported as far away as Australia, where officials said the country's federal police and an intelligence agency were among the organizations affected.
Microsoft said early Friday that it had made what it described as marginal success in patching the affected servers, suggesting a fix was underway but not yet complete. The company has not detailed the root cause of the disruption. For many office workers, the outage meant an unplanned pause: without access to email or messaging platforms, some described taking the morning more slowly than usual, while others on social media said they briefly worried they had lost access to their accounts for other reasons before realizing the problem was widespread.
The incident is a reminder of how concentrated much of the world's office communication infrastructure has become. Outlook and Teams are used by large employers, government agencies, and small businesses alike, meaning an outage at this scale can ripple through unrelated industries simultaneously. Organizations that rely on alternative email providers, such as Google's Workspace, were largely unaffected, which some employees noted with relief on social media even as colleagues elsewhere dealt with the disruption.
Microsoft has faced scrutiny in the past over the resilience of its cloud infrastructure, and outages of this scale tend to renew conversations among corporate technology leaders about redundancy and backup systems for essential communication tools.
Microsoft is expected to provide a fuller explanation of the outage's cause once services are restored, along with any commitments about preventing a repeat.
What caused the Microsoft outage?
Microsoft had not detailed a specific root cause as of Friday morning, saying only that it was making progress patching affected servers.
Which services were affected?
Outlook email and Microsoft Teams were the most widely reported affected services, with impacts felt by users and organizations around the world.