Microsoft 365 outage disrupts global services as cloud provider investigates server failures
A widespread outage of Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, affected schools, courts, health agencies and businesses worldwide, with the company attributing the issue to cascading server failures and working on a recovery.
A Microsoft 365 outage that began on Thursday continued into Friday, affecting widely used services such as Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The company reported that the problem stemmed from cascading server failures in multiple data centers, which shifted excess load onto remaining machines.
Microsoft said the elevated load was not driven by increased traffic but by a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, and that it was testing a configuration change to address health-check failures. The firm added that no recent change had been linked to the incident and that there was no indication of a cyberattack.
The disruption impacted schools, courts, government agencies, law-enforcement bodies and numerous businesses across several continents. In Australia, examinations and medical appointments were delayed; in Japan, government staff resorted to phones and chat tools; in the United Kingdom, police forces could not accept online crime reports and parts of the National Health Service experienced backlogs. Deutsche Bahn reported that email outages hampered the distribution of timetables, and similar issues were reported in the Netherlands, France and South Africa. North American users also faced delays in email notifications for rail bookings, housing evictions and bond payments.
Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at monitoring firm Kentik, described the event as comparable to the large-scale Facebook outage of October 2021 and noted that recovery varied by data-center source. Swapneel Patnekar, CEO of Shreshta IT Technologies, emphasized the critical nature of the affected services for government and essential organisations.
Analysts pointed to recent staff reductions at Microsoft, including layoffs and attrition, as a possible factor affecting institutional knowledge, though no direct link to the outage was confirmed. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
The incident has prompted officials in several countries to call for greater resilience and diversification of digital infrastructure, highlighting concerns about reliance on a small number of large technology providers.