Microsoft's Outlook Outage Stretches Into Second Day

Microsoft Corp. has failed for a second day to fully restore Outlook, Teams and its Copilot AI tool, in one of the longest outages in the company's history. Disruptions that began Thursday continued into Friday, paralyzing government offices, traders and businesses globally — a duration that stands out because previous Microsoft disruptions have rarely lasted more than several hours.

The company has posted near-hourly status updates while it reroutes user traffic away from affected servers. Its investigation found that "a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss," according to Microsoft. The company said the cause wasn't obviously malicious. In a Friday status update, Microsoft reported "positive signs for server stability," but services had not been restored.

How far did the damage spread?

Users in more than 70 countries reported problems accessing Microsoft products, according to Downdetector, which logged hundreds of thousands of complaints. Beyond Outlook, Teams and Copilot, the outage disrupted cybersecurity software, file-sharing services and administrator tools — all sold alongside Word and Excel in the company's M365 bundle.

Governments and public services took direct hits. Japan's finance ministry said it had been unable to receive emails for most of the day. Japanese government ministries, locked out of their inboxes, resorted to pinning up paper notices to inform journalists about daily schedules. New Zealand's immigration officials paused processing of all visa applications.

In the UK, Guy's and St. Thomas' hospital in London warned patients that email was offline, though procedures went ahead as planned. Several local UK police forces said they couldn't take crime reports online, according to the Guardian.

Financial markets felt it too. Traders in Singapore, Indian brokerages and officials in Tokyo reported issues with Microsoft services on Friday. Euronext warned that its email communications were unavailable. Staffers at the Reserve Bank of Australia were affected, with Outlook down across departments — though the bank said critical operations ran normally.

What did it cost corporate America?

Companies built on Microsoft systems had to scrap scheduled events. Swiss luxury group Richemont SA and US truck and bus manufacturer Workhorse Group Inc. both postponed earnings releases this week; Richemont has since filed its report.

PVH Corp., the apparel conglomerate that owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, announced Thursday in internal emails and stock exchange filings that it would cut about 4% of its global workforce. Some of the layoff conversations, scheduled to start in Asia on Friday morning, didn't happen because of the outages, leaving employees uncertain about their future, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity. PVH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Why does one outage matter this much?

The incident lays bare how much of the global economy runs on a single vendor's email, chat and corporate software — and what happens when that becomes a single point of failure. Most technology glitches get fixed quickly. But faulty updates and server trouble at one key provider can ripple worldwide.

The precedent is recent. A 15-hour disruption at Amazon Web Services last year knocked out hundreds of websites. A faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. in 2024 grounded flights and crashed systems around the world, causing billions of dollars in damages.

Microsoft's Friday acknowledgment of "positive signs for server stability" suggests recovery is underway, but the company hasn't set a firm timeline for full restoration. Until it does, the outage will keep feeding a harder question for corporate buyers: whether bundling an entire workplace on one vendor's cloud is a efficiency play or a concentration risk.