Millions of workers, businesses, and government agencies across 74 countries have been hit by a massive, prolonged Microsoft outage, which has left them unable to access vital workplace tools.
The disruption, which began around 18:00 GMT on Thursday and is still ongoing, has knocked core Microsoft 365 applications – including Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and the Copilot AI assistant – offline.
At the peak of the disruption, outage-tracking website Downdetector logged nearly 140,000 global reports of issues with Outlook alone.
Microsoft has ruled out a cyberattack, attributing the crash to an “elevated load” after a large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, overwhelming remaining infrastructure.
While the tech giant reported “positive results” for server stability this morning, it earlier acknowledged that initial fixes were “not taking as expected,” resulting in an unusually lengthy blackout.
For the global business community, the operational ramifications were immediate and severe. With more than 430 million people relying on Microsoft 365, organisations found their primary communication arteries severed.
In the US, industrial firm Workhorse Group has been forced to postpone its third-quarter earnings call. In Hong Kong, bankers at major financial institutions including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have reported significant workflow disruptions.
The ripple effects extended deep into the tech sector and public infrastructure. Artificial intelligence giants OpenAI and Anthropic reported connectivity issues with Microsoft-linked tools. Meanwhile, UK NHS staff have struggled to send emails, while across the private sector, British businesses face a sluggish Friday morning as Outlook inboxes fail to load and Teams calls have been dropped.
The issue, which comes just a few weeks after two critical security flaws in PHP forced websites offline around the world, Cybersecurity experts have said that the incident serves as yet another stark warning about corporate over-reliance on a handful of cloud providers as businesses worldwide are once again confronting the costly reality of single-vendor dependency.
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