The global outage affecting Microsoft’s sprawling set of software tools continued into Friday morning, leaving businesses and workers without crucial utilities, some for more than 12 hours.
The outage affects software used by hundreds of millions of users, impairing corporate offices, government agencies and individuals who rely on the company’s suite of services to send emails, draft letters, conduct virtual meetings and many other daily functions.
“It shows how reliant we are on these cloud systems,” said Dr. Timothy Wood, a professor of computer science at George Washington University.
It began on Thursday afternoon, as workers and offices around the world began reporting issues with a range of Microsoft 365’s tools and apps, including email and chat software. By Friday, some airlines and artificial intelligence companies also said they were affected by the outage.
Around 1 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, the outage tracker Downdetector showed that more than 130,000 users were experiencing problems with Microsoft Outlook, the workplace messaging app Microsoft Teams, the A.I. assistant Microsoft Copilot and the Microsoft Store.
In an update posted on social media around 5 p.m., Microsoft said it was “opening all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief.”
Microsoft said after 10 p.m. on Thursday night that its changes were “not taking as expected.” A Microsoft executive, Charles Lamanna, said on social media that there was no indication that the outage was the “result of malicious or cyber activity.” As of 2.30 a.m., the company said some users might still be unable to connect to its services.
Companies affected by the outage include the Indian low-cost carrier Indigo, which said that its email support services had been disrupted. South Africa’s CemAir said it was experiencing “system disruptions” due to the outage. Neither had reported flight disruptions as of Friday morning.
A.I. companies OpenAI and Anthropic also said they were experiencing issues with their connections to Microsoft services on Friday.
On Thursday evening, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado said jail officials could not receive emails to process bond payments for detained individuals because of the outage.
A hospital system in Toronto, Unity Health, said in a statement that its staff members were having trouble sending and receiving email, and asked patients to call instead to arrange appointments. Pennsylvania State University described how Microsoft’s services, such as its planner and A.I. agents, were impaired by the outage.
Microsoft had said that part of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load across multiple regions.”
The company later said that it had begun redistributing traffic across its broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load and that it was restarting affected servers.
The outage prompted waves of frustration, anger — and glee. On social media and Reddit, some embraced the system shortage, which allowed them to step away from work, while others expressed concern over how they might be able to work in the future.
Mr. Wood said the outage might have stemmed from a botched software update, problems with various servers or a system that checks the servers’ health.
Microsoft’s servers could be functioning properly, but the system responsible for checking on their maintenance could be malfunctioning, Mr. Wood said.
“The thermometer is broken,” he said, “and anyone you test looks like they have a fever.”
Hari Raj contributed reporting.
