Microsoft Struggles to Repair Worldwide Outage. Here's What You Need to Know - Time Magazine

An outage affecting Microsoft services including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot has stretched into a second day, leaving businesses and governments around the world struggling to access email communications.

Microsoft said that as of Friday morning, users may still “be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.” While it noted an “encouraging recovery progress in Europe,” with some access in North America “also improving,” it acknowledged that users may still experience “intermittent issues” as recovery actions continue and major gaps persist.

“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” the company stated. 

Outlook and Teams are widely-used workplace applications, with hundreds of millions of users. The disruption to the services has left some affected workers unable to access their emails, host meetings, or complete other Microsoft-dependent office tasks.

Municipal governments across the United States are still encountering significant system issues, with digital communications interrupted.

Baltimore County Government said its staff are "currently unable to send or receive emails due to the widespread Microsoft outage,” but assured the public that 911 and other essential county services had not been affected. The City of Jacksonville, Florida, and City of Austin, Texas, reported similar disruptions to its email capabilities. 

Tech businesses have also faced disruptions to their day-to-day operations.

Users of two leading artificial intelligence companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, reported failures involving Microsoft 365 integration tools.

Overseas, the U.K. government said it is still “experiencing problems sending and receiving emails.”

The outage also impacted Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), raising concerns about access to appointments and hospital schedules. Some NHS practices have reported not being able to send or receive emails, while others are still assessing the overall impact of the outage. Patients have been advised to make contact via phone rather than using email. As a result, some NHS boards have warned of an increased demand across phone lines.

In Japan, lawmaker Masanao Ozaki said the outage had affected the government's IT infrastructure and that officials were “closely watching the company's response.” Meanwhile, the Philippines' Supreme Court warned that “responses to emails and other transactions may be delayed.”

In India, the outage disrupted operations at several airlines, with IndiGo and Akasa Air reporting problems related to its customer-support email services.

In Australia, federal bodies including intelligence agency ASIO and the Australian Federal Police were affected. Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke reiterated that Microsoft did not believe it was dealing with a cyberattack, suggesting the disruption could instead be related to a faulty software update.

"They believe they are dealing in some ways similar ‌to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike, where there is an update that has gone awry," Burke said at a press conference.

A major Microsoft IT outage in 2024 grounded flights, sent TV stations off air, and disrupted online hospital systems. The malfunction was linked to a third party, a cybersecurity technology firm named CrowdStrike. 

The current Microsoft outage began Thursday and peaked in the afternoon, with outage-tracking website Downdetector.com recording nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems and more than 45,000 reports involving Microsoft 365 in the U.S. around 1 p.m. E.T.

Microsoft has continued to issue updates as its engineers work to restore affected services. The company said it would restart and repair impacted infrastructure, before gradually bringing the services back online.

Engineers were also exploring additional measures, such as actively restarting and validating affected servers and using automated recovery systems to find and restart unresponsive servers, in an effort to speed up the process.

TIME has reached out to Microsoft for further information.

This isn’t the first time Microsoft has experienced an outage. In addition to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, the company also experienced disruptions affecting Microsoft 365 in January this year and flagged connectivity issues across multiple regions with its Azure cloud platform in October last year.