Microsoft has restored service to Outlook and Teams after a historic outage that disrupted businesses and governments around the world. The company said on X that it had completed its efforts to address the underlying issue and restored service to the remaining impacted customers and regions. Microsoft had attributed the incident to server issues, which also affected its Copilot AI assistant, and said it was not aware of any malicious activity, ruling out AI as the cause.
The outage affected government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States, caused delays at trading firms, hindered some companies from publishing earnings, and prompted airlines to warn customers of communication lags, according to public statements. Organisations hosting Microsoft services on their own servers rather than in the cloud were somewhat spared. Microsoft said the disruption specifically hit features tied to Exchange Online, its cloud-based email and scheduling hub, while unconnected applications remained operational.S1
Reports began climbing around 12:25 p.m. ET on Thursday, according to Ookla, the parent company of Downdetector, and the outage is one of the longest in Microsoft's history. Downdetector logged more than 7.4 million reports worldwide, peaking at nearly 20,000 a minute, more than 1,500 times normal levels, with spikes coinciding with the start of the workday across Asia and Europe. Luke Kehoe, lead industry analyst at Ookla, said the episode showed how much of the working day now runs through one provider's email and collaboration tools.S1S2
Microsoft shares closed flat at $523.88 on Friday and have gained roughly 8% so far this year. Mario De Cicco, vice president of European financial institutions at Morningstar DBRS, estimated global insured losses at between $300 million and $500 million, well below the $400 million to $1.5 billion toll from the 2024 CrowdStrike outage. Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at eToro, said the concern was that this was not the first Microsoft 365 outage this year, following disruptions in January and October last year and a Azure cloud platform outage last month.S1
