The global outage affecting Microsoft services reverberated around the world on Friday, upending services relied upon by millions of people. Parents struggled to contact their children’s schools, some government services faltered and many office workers could not access their email inboxes as the disruptions stretched into a second day.
Microsoft said after 5 a.m. Eastern on Friday that its efforts to repair the problem had made “incremental improvement” to its services. But major gaps persisted.
The issues hamstrung a range of Microsoft tools including the email manager Microsoft Outlook, the workplace messaging and video calling app Microsoft Teams, and the A.I. assistant Microsoft Copilot. By early Friday, Microsoft said that the core functions of Teams and Copilot were online.
The outage spawned reports dysfunction in corporate offices, government agencies and other services in dozens of countries as workers struggled to complete everyday tasks intertwined with Microsoft products.
In Australia, intelligence and police forces said that their operations had been affected. Singapore’s tax authority said its email capabilities were disrupted. And in Britain, some schools asked parents to contact them by phone because their email systems were down.
“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 tools and apps, including email and chat software. By Friday, some airlines and artificial intelligence companies also said they had been affected.
Around 5 a.m. on Friday, Microsoft said that recovery had “progressed in phases across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure.” While there had been “incremental improvement,” the company said that capacity had still not been fully reinstated.
“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” it added.
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.
The artificial intelligence 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 and anger — but some glee, too. On social media and Reddit, some users embraced the opportunity to step away from work before the weekend. 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.
Hari Raj contributed reporting.
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