Microsoft said engineers were addressing connectivity issues that started just before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, as parts of its infrastructure experienced elevated load across multiple regions and some servers failed automated health checks. The company initially pointed to a traffic spike in part of its systems and a component tied to server health processing.
Outlook and several Microsoft 365 services, including SharePoint and Copilot, were broadly unavailable during the U.S. morning on Friday and across business hours in Asia and Europe. External services that plug into Microsoft products also saw knock-on problems. Users began regaining access to email and other tools on Friday morning.
Microsoft said it found no signs of malicious activity behind the outage. It linked the disruption to "an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade." At 4 p.m. ET Thursday, the company said it had validated an alternative way to check service health that allowed some affected servers to return, and that it was rolling that approach out more widely.
Microsoft's teams took impacted systems offline to apply fixes and then brought them back up in stages. They focused on protecting emails delayed during recovery and on cutting down queues and backlogs, extending the window for delayed emails to keep retrying delivery to 48 hours.
On Friday morning, Microsoft said email queues were approaching normal but warned that some intermittent issues could persist as restoration continued. Around 10:30 a.m. ET, it reported "encouraging recovery progress" and improving service availability and email delivery across a larger share of the infrastructure.
The company also prepared automated recovery systems to detect and restart unresponsive servers to keep services stable. Microsoft said it would publish a full report after completing its assessment.
Microsoft noted that Asia Pacific services were among the first to start normalizing. Governments and companies across Asia Pacific and Europe reported they were keeping tabs on the disruption. In the U.K., the National Health Service said some services were affected and urged patients to attend appointments as usual, and a trust covering South West London and Surrey in England posted on X that phone lines might keep callers waiting a long time.
Corporate calendars shifted too. Richemont said the outage pushed its earnings release back slightly on Friday. Workhorse Group shifted its planned third quarter results from Nov. 12 to Nov. 16, pointing to business disruptions from a worldwide Microsoft outage. Air India said it briefly diverted email traffic to continue receiving customer messages and added that flight operations were unaffected.
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Users of Amazon Web Services and Google also reported issues on Thursday. Posting on X, Amazon said its services were operating as expected, attributing some erroneous reports to a separate internet outage elsewhere in the network and directing users to its health dashboard. Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said at a press conference that Microsoft "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," according to Reuters. A faulty CrowdStrike update led to a major global IT outage in 2024.
Speaking by phone, James Owen, who heads Digital Risks as managing partner at Control Risks, said the incident underscores a long-running resilience and dependency problem as organizations rely on a narrower set of technology and infrastructure for daily operations. He highlighted the need for recovery planning, including manual backups, offline protocols, diverse suppliers and crisis drills.
The stock traded largely flat on Friday, suggesting a muted market reaction as services stabilized.
The outage showed how one technical fault can ripple through customers, partners and suppliers, delaying schedules and even earnings releases. Microsoft reported in 2025 that Copilot surpassed 100 million monthly active users, a scale that helps explain the widespread effects when core services go down. Microsoft said it has found no evidence of malicious activity and will issue a detailed report when its review is complete.
In plain English: operational risk from critical vendors is real. If your holdings depend on Microsoft 365 or cloud integrations, events like this can temporarily disrupt business operations. The bottom line will depend on how quickly recovery completes and what safeguards are added next.
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