Global Microsoft Outage Cripples Vital Public Services and Stalls Workplace Communications

Microsoft suffered an extensive global network failure on Thursday and Friday, halting email and workplace tools for businesses, hospitals and government agencies in dozens of countries.

The disruption began midday Thursday and stretched for more than 24 hours, affecting services including Outlook and Teams across at least 74 countries and territories, according to online tracker Downdetector.

More than 430 million people use the affected programs worldwide, leaving essential communication networks vulnerable when core digital infrastructure falters.

"This is absolutely going to go down as one of the big ones, up there with the Facebook outage of October 2021," said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at monitoring firm Kentik.

In Britain, the National Health Service experienced disruption across hundreds of hospitals and clinics, where medical staff were unable to access digital systems and turned to paper records.

The incident delayed legal proceedings across the British court system, forcing staff to search for working fax machines as an alternative to email.

"Many institutions rely on Microsoft 365, as do the court and various institutions connected to the court, so there have all been sort of delays because of this," said Judge Maurice Greene at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester.

The breakdown also disrupted police operations in Britain and North America, delayed property transactions, and affected government agencies in Singapore, Japan, Canada and New Zealand.

"The impact goes well beyond the inconvenience of a typical service disruption," said Swapneel Patnekar, chief executive of Indian web security firm Shreshta IT Technologies.

Microsoft said the failure began during an upgrade following a network change, which caused servers to fail automated health checks and overloaded remaining machines with connection requests.

Microsoft said the event was not caused by a cyberattack or artificial intelligence systems, and engineers eased the strain by reversing the network change.

To prevent servers from collapsing again under normal workloads, Microsoft brought systems back online in stages while processing a large backlog of delayed messages.

Microsoft said it restored service, but the company faces an engineering review to determine how to avoid similar failures while remaining silent on customer compensation.