A widespread global outage affecting numerous Microsoft 365 services continued into Friday morning after initially beginning around midday on Thursday. The disruption impacted users across Microsoft email, cloud, and artificial intelligence platforms globally.
Global Impact on Essential Services
Microsoft published a comprehensive list of the services affected by the error and took steps early Friday morning to prevent customers worldwide from losing emails during the prolonged disruption. The Microsoft 365 Status account announced on X that recovery actions were ongoing and that the email timeout had been extended to 48 hours to help preserve delayed mail.
Ciaran Martin, the former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, told NBC News that the Microsoft disruption resembles recent major outages involving Amazon Web Services and CrowdStrike, describing it as potentially one of the biggest and even worse than previous incidents.
The outage forced businesses, hospitals, police departments, and schools to find workarounds. Deputy chief cabinet secretary Masanao Ozaki stated that the disruption affected government IT infrastructure in Japan. Reports documented extensive impacts on public bodies, including instances where doctors were unable to send patients crucial updates regarding medication modifications or follow-up care.
The financial industry also experienced difficulties as individuals could not complete bank transfers because verification codes failed to arrive. Justice systems faced disruptions as well, affecting legal work at the Supreme Court in the Philippines and hindering the ability to post bond for prisoner releases at a Colorado sheriff’s office in the United States.
Although the exact number of affected users remains uncertain, Microsoft reported in January that paid commercial subscriptions for Microsoft 365 surpassed 450 million.
Microsoft Response and Investigation
Microsoft stated on a status page that there is no evidence indicating malicious activity was linked to the incident and committed to releasing a full Post-Incident Report detailing the root cause and defense-in-depth measures once mitigation finishes. The company also noted on X that it was aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce the impact.
Public statements from Microsoft indicated that the technology company was caught off guard by the failure and spent hours attempting to find reliable fixes to restore access for users.
