Microsoft said its services had returned to normal across Teams, Outlook and other products, bringing an end to a worldwide outage that disrupted online communications for businesses and government bodies for more than 24 hours.
“We have completed our efforts to address the underlying issue of the incident and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions,” the company said in a post on X.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to server problems that also affected its Copilot AI assistant. The company said it had found no evidence of malicious activity, making clear that artificial intelligence was not responsible for the failure.
Outlook and Teams rank among the world’s most widely used workplace applications, serving hundreds of millions of users.
Error messages appeared on Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Copilot pages on a laptop
Problems were reported in Ireland and the UK from about 6pm on Thursday evening.
Ireland’s Health Service Executive said Healthmail had been affected, disrupting a system used by GPs, pharmacies and prescription services. Doctors and pharmacists were advised to use paper prescriptions under the GMS scheme.
The HSE also reported intermittent difficulties with Microsoft’s video-conferencing services, although it said no services had been affected at that stage.
Public statements indicated that government agencies from Australia and Japan to the United States were affected. Trading firms reported delays, some companies struggled to publish earnings and airlines warned passengers that communications could be slower than usual.
Organisations running Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than relying on the company’s cloud infrastructure, experienced less disruption.
Another outage for Microsoft
The incident ranks among the longest outages in Microsoft’s history and marks the second major interruption to its services this year. Microsoft said the failure was concentrated in features linked to Exchange Online, its cloud-based email and scheduling platform, while applications not connected to it continued to operate.
The incident has renewed concerns about the world’s reliance on a small group of Big Tech companies that provide both essential workplace software and the cloud infrastructure supporting it.
Microsoft also experienced an outage affecting its 365 services in January this year and October last year
The disruption also exposed how deeply Microsoft’s workplace tools are woven into daily operations. Outage reports surged as employees began their working days across Asia and Europe, according to Ookla, the parent company of Downdetector.
Downdetector recorded more than 7.4 million reports globally, with complaints reaching almost 20,000 a minute—more than 1,500 times the usual level.
“It shows how much of the working day now runs through one provider’s email and collaboration tools,” said Luke Kehoe, lead industry analyst at Ookla.
Microsoft shares finished flat at $523.88 yesterday. The stock is up roughly 8% so far this year.
The outage could generate a large number of insurance claims and related financial losses, but the broader impact on insurers is expected to remain limited, according to Mario De Cicco, vice president of European financial institutions at MorningstarDBRS.
Mr De Cicco put global insured losses from the incident at between $300 million and $500m. That estimate is significantly below the $400m to $1.5 billion cost attributed to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which brought down more than 8 million Windows-based computers and caused widespread disruption.
Microsoft also experienced an outage affecting its 365 services in January this year and October last year.
Last month, the company reported an outage affecting its Azure cloud platform, disrupting its productivity suite and a range of industries around the world.
“The bigger worry is that this is not the first Microsoft365 outage this year,” said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro.
Read more:
Microsoft outage: What went wrong and what was the impact?
“If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider’s hands.”
Even so, some analysts have questioned whether outages of this kind will drive customers to rival providers, given the steep switching costs involved in replacing tools so deeply embedded in everyday work.
Trades had to be confirmed by fax
A spokesperson for the UK government said officials were working with Microsoft to resolve the outage, which affected organisations including the NHS and London’s Metropolitan Police.
The loss of access to email and other services hindered the Metropolitan Police’s ability to file some crime reports online, although its response to emergency calls was unaffected.
The NHS said its local services were adopting alternatives, including other IT systems and paper records.
Businesses across several sectors also felt the effects.
European exchange operator Euronext reported email problems, British insurer Aviva switched to backup arrangements for its earnings calls and Danish shipping company Maersk warned customers that updates could be delayed.
US AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic reported issues with Microsoft connectors, which were later resolved. Indian airlines IndiGo, Akasa Air and Air India said their email support operations had been affected.
The outage also interfered with fund management at Taiwanese securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies.
One company cancelled a bond repurchase transaction as a result, according to a source familiar with the situation who spoke to Reuters. A second source said another Taiwanese financial firm had to use fax to confirm trades.
