A global Microsoft 365 outage has hit millions - what happened and when will it be fixed?

Explainer A global Microsoft 365 outage has hit millions – what happened and when will it be fixed? Problem affects businesses, government agencies and even tech firm’s own employees

Microsoft scrambles to fix global outage affecting Teams and Outlook

Millions of people were unable to access their emails, Teams chats or meetings on Thursday night and Friday morning after a Microsoft 365 outage brought down services across the globe.

The incident affected businesses, government agencies and even Microsoft employees.

What happened and why – and what does it say about online services in 2026?

At about 6pm GMT on Thursday, the outage website Down Detector showed an increase in users reporting issues with Microsoft 365 – the suite of cloud software that includes Teams, Word Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. There were nearly 130,000 reports at the time.

The outage has lasted for nearly 16 hours at the time of reporting, with Microsoft working to bring services back online.

On Friday morning, Microsoft had narrowed down most of the problems to Microsoft Exchange – the email service behind Outlook. Teams meetings and chats had returned to service.

In its latest update on the progress to fix its systems, Microsoft said at 9.10am that it was “seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced”.

So far, the problem appears to be a configuration update which has resulted in some servers becoming overloaded and taken offline, Microsoft indicated.

When the company attempted to apply a fix, servers that had come back online again became unresponsive when traffic began returning to them.

As some servers went down, traffic was funnelled on to the remaining servers, causing traffic problems for those remaining online.

To understand what was bringing down the servers, the company began limiting the traffic that could reach affected servers in specific locations, and, on some servers, rolled back to an earlier software configuration to see if it fixed the problem.

An outage that runs for so long for a service as critical as Microsoft 365 is unusual. The company has not said why it has lasted this long, but a clue might be in its updates: as servers returned to being unresponsive after being fixed, engineers had to work through alternative solutions, taking longer than expected to get servers back up and running.

Many people who rely on Microsoft 365 were reporting being unable to access their inboxes on Friday in Australia.

Councils, state and federal government agencies, courts and schools were among those telling the public that they weren’t contactable by email.

Businesses and health care services that rely on Microsoft 365 for communications were also reporting problems but said their own services remained operational.

In the UK, the government said it was “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, adding that there were “robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption”.

The NHS, which in England has a five-year deal to use Microsoft 365, has said that a range of services including remote therapy sessions have been disrupted.

NHS sources said the healthcare system was experiencing “widespread” and “serious” disruption, with staff reporting being unable to access email and IT systems.

With the NHS email system also disrupted, pharmacies are reporting problems communicating with some GP surgeries about prescriptions, leading to “significant” waiting times for medicines.

Several UK police forces have urged people not to try to report crimes online and to phone them in instead.

Some schools in the UK have notified parents that services such as email and Teams are down, and that reporting attendance or absence issues have to be done via phone.

The Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected, and Taiwanese security firms, life insurers and investment trust companies said fund management services had been disrupted.

In financial markets, some portfolio managers have been unable to use email to authenticate their access to some trading platforms.

In Japan, the shipping company Sagawa Express said it was unable to accept online reservations for some of its services at airports and railway stations, while Taisho, a major pharmaceutical company, said it was having to handle orders by phone.

Given the recent OpenAI agent attack on Medicare, and the spate of cyber-attacks in Europe bringing down internet-connected fridges, some quickly guessed the global outage might be a new attack on critical infrastructure. Microsoft quickly hosed down the idea, saying there was no indication it was a cyber-attack.

As the name Microsoft 365 implies, the world has quickly become accustomed to online services being available 24/7. Given software is no longer solely downloaded to individual PCs but is also stored on a server owned by a company, outages such as this will happen. Most of the time they are brief but sometimes they are not.

Outages in recent years from telecommunications providers , from the PHP incident to the Crowdstrike incident , show just how varied the sources and causes of a massive outage can be.

There are so many different pieces of the puzzle keeping services online – but the effects of one of those services going down is much greater than it ever has been.

The RMIT University associate professor Mark Gregory said on Friday it was important for organisations to thoroughly test updates before rolling them out to the live network. That is in addition to the extra security testing companies must carry out to ensure their services are protected from threat actors armed with AI tools that can find vulnerabilities quicker than ever before.

Gregory has said companies that rely on services such as Microsoft 365 should have backup options such as Google’s Gmail in the event of an outage.

Others have suggested the free and open-source Office alternative, LibreOffice.