Microsoft apologizes for massive outage that caused chaos for businesses

• Microsoft’s 365 outage entered a second day, affecting services like Teams and Outlook.
• Microsoft says its services are recovering.
• The outage disrupted governments, businesses, airlines, and some AI tools.

Microsoft has apologized for a massive outage that dragged into a second day and disrupted access to email, Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 tools.

The company said late Friday morning that services were recovering and stabilizing.

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” the company said in an X post. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”

The cause of the outage, which disrupted businesses around the world, was “technical” and “not related to cyber or AI / agents,” Microsoft added.

The company said it has addressed the underlying issue, which stemmed from an earlier network upgrade, and is continuing to restore services. It did not provide a timeline for a full recovery.

What happened?

Microsoft first flagged the outage on Thursday around midday ET, writing in an X post that users in the Americas were having trouble accessing Exchange Online mailboxes. In a follow-up post, it said the issue could affect users “in any region.”

Later on Thursday, Microsoft said on X that some of its infrastructure was under elevated load across multiple regions. It said the strain was not caused by an increase in customer traffic, but because a number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable.

By Friday morning, Microsoft’s public service status page was still showing “service degradation” for both Microsoft 365 business customers and consumer products.

It also had a knock-on effect on some AI tools. Anthropic and OpenAI said in status update pages that their connectors to Microsoft 365 tools had been disrupted. Anthropic said late Friday morning that it was seeing some recovery, but “Microsoft’s incident remains open, so errors may return.”

What was the impact?

The outage caused significant disruption for businesses, with many workers unable to use systems such as email or Teams.

Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US at the outage’s peak on Thursday. That figure reflects user reports, not a confirmed count of affected people or businesses.

Other Microsoft services were affected too. It said in its service advisory that the disruption could affect Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, Microsoft Defender, Intune, Power BI, and other Microsoft 365 products that rely on Exchange Online.

Reuters reported on Thursday that the US House of Representatives said the outage had affected its users, while electric-truck maker Workhorse Group postponed its quarterly earnings call because of the disruption.

Air India said in a Thursday X post that it had rerouted email services, while IndiGo said in an X post on Friday that its email support channel was disrupted. Both airlines said their flight operations were unaffected. AP also reported that government agencies in Singapore, the Philippines, and Japan had reported knock-on effects.

Is this unusual?

Microsoft and other Big Tech companies have been here before.

This outage, however, is unusually long.

It lasted more than 22 hours — longer than a major Microsoft 365 disruption in June 2022, which took 16 hours and 27 minutes to recover from, according to a Microsoft service alert, potentially making it the company’s longest 365 outage ever.

Microsoft also suffered a separate outage for Azure, its cloud service, on September 30 and October 1, affecting customers across several regions. Microsoft said it rolled back a change after some customers had trouble using its cloud networking services.

Other cloud providers have faced similar problems. Google said a global Google Cloud and Workspace outage in June 2025 lasted three hours.

Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing arm, also had a major disruption in Northern Virginia in October 2025. It said it fixed the initial problem in about two and a half hours, though some services took longer to return to normal.