If your work email still isn’t loading this morning, it’s not you. Microsoft’s Outlook has been down or barely working for many users around the world since Thursday, and the company says it has had only “marginal success” getting it back, Al Jazeera reported. Teams and Copilot were hit too. Microsoft hasn’t said when everything will be fixed.
The outage started around midday Eastern time on Thursday. Within about an hour, the tracking site Downdetector had reports from 74 countries and territories. By early Friday it had logged at least 43,000 reports about Outlook alone, and the real number of people affected is likely far higher.
What caused the Microsoft outage?
Microsoft hasn’t said yet. It says it wasn’t a hack. “There is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Charles Lamanna, a Microsoft executive vice president, posted late Thursday.
Here’s what Microsoft has said. A number of its servers “became unexpectedly unavailable,” which put heavy load on the rest, and that load wasn’t caused by more people logging on. It paused new updates, restarted and added servers, and started rolling back a recent network change, CIO&Leader reported, though it hasn’t said that change was to blame. Some servers it brought back failed again. Australia’s home affairs minister said Microsoft told him “there is an update that has gone awry.” Microsoft says it will publish a full report on the cause once the problem is fixed.
Is Outlook working now, and what can you do?
For many people, not fully. Microsoft says service will come back gradually as apps reconnect, not all at once. Since the problem is on Microsoft’s end, there isn’t much you can fix yourself. A few things that help:
- The desktop Outlook app may still show emails you’d already downloaded.
- Teams chats and calls have mostly kept working, so use them for anything urgent.
- Emails sent during the outage may arrive late rather than not at all. Don’t resend everything twice.
- Check Microsoft’s official status page or the Microsoft 365 Status account on X before trusting any “fix” link. Outages bring out phishing scams.
Why does one company’s outage hit so many people?
Because so much runs on it. Government systems in Singapore and Japan were disrupted, and in Australia the federal police and the country’s spy agency were among those hit. Other companies that plug into Microsoft’s services, including AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, saw problems too.
It’s also not the first time this year. In January, Microsoft 365 went down across North America for almost 10 hours, and in August thousands of Outlook users were locked out. The 2024 CrowdStrike update that grounded flights is still the outage everyone compares these to.
The BeezLoop Take
When one company’s email goes down and courts, police and governments on three continents lose their inboxes, that’s not a tech hiccup. It’s a sign of how much of daily life now rides on a few cloud providers, with very little backup.
Microsoft charges businesses every month for these services. A day-plus outage with no clear explanation and no timeline isn’t good enough, and customers should expect real credits, not just a report later.
The open question: will this finally push big employers and governments to keep a backup system that doesn’t depend on Microsoft, or will everyone forget by next week?
Sources: Al Jazeera · CIO&Leader · CBS News Sacramento (video)
