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Microsoft's Global Outlook and Teams Outage Drags Into Second Day, Disrupting Businesses and Governments Worldwide
A massive Microsoft 365 disruption that began Thursday knocked out Outlook, Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint and Copilot across multiple regions, with recovery still incomplete by Friday morning.
A major outage knocked out Microsoft's cloud services worldwide starting Thursday, leaving businesses and government agencies locked out of email, chat and collaboration tools for more than a full day as the company worked to restore normal service.
The disruption hit Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR, according to SecurityWeek, with Microsoft tracking the incident internally as MO1550821 alongside a related Exchange Online issue. Outage-tracking site Downdetector logged more than 48,000 reports from U.S. users by early Thursday afternoon, and the disruption rippled across multiple regions rather than staying confined to one data center.
Recovery Dragged Into Friday
Microsoft said in an 8:05 a.m. ET update Friday that services were "gradually recovering," with improving email access and delivery after a rocky overnight stretch, per Forbes' tracking of the incident. The company has not publicly detailed a root cause, though it has said it found no evidence the outage resulted from a cyberattack, according to BleepingComputer's reporting.
The outage's reach extended well beyond individual users checking email. Several companies that rely on Microsoft's cloud infrastructure for internal operations, including AI firms Anthropic and OpenAI, were also affected, illustrating how deeply embedded Microsoft's back-end services have become across the tech industry.
GRADUALLY RECOVERING
That was Microsoft's own characterization of the fix as of Friday morning — a notably cautious update for a company whose cloud outages have drawn increasing scrutiny after several high-profile incidents over the past year, including a lengthy Azure Front Door disruption in 2025 tied to a configuration error.
What's Next
Microsoft has not said when it expects full service to be restored or when it will publish a post-incident review detailing what went wrong. IT administrators have been advised to monitor the Microsoft 365 Service Health dashboard for updates as the company works through the backlog of delayed email and disrupted services.