Microsoft outage live: company ‘deeply sorry’ for disruption affecting millions and says it’s ‘not related to cyber or AI’

Some US cities have reported their Microsoft services are now returning after the global outage.

The sheriff’s office in Arapahoe County, Colorado, which previously reported the outage was affecting online bond payments, said the issue has been resolved.

The police department of Greensboro, North Carolina, also saw its services restored. It joked: “While it’s not the outcome we wanted, we would like to let you know that our email is working again.”

Jacksonville, Florida, said it was “seeing some services restored this morning and remain cautiously optimistic they will continue making progress.”

Austin and Dallas, Texas, also reported progress on their email services being restored, CNN reported.

The Microsoft Outlook outage has shaken up companies and local governments across the US that use its suite of email, calendar, video conferencing and cloud storage systems.

Even as Outlook started to resume normal operations Friday morning, local leaders from across the country, including in Miami, Maryland and Los Angeles, warned residents that certain staff or services were still unavailable due to the outage that started around 1pm ET on Thursday.

In Colorado, one local detention facility in Arapahoe county said that they were unable to take online bond payments to release detainees because of the outage.

“Until Outlook email is restored, anyone needing to post bond for immediate release must do so in person at the jail,” the office said in a social media statement.

The Los Angeles county sheriff’s department also warned that it was experiencing disruptions in its email and other communications platforms.

Emergency management services in Fredericksburg and Gillespie county in Texas said they were unable to receive emails and encouraged residents and partners to call instead.

Around Maryland, the Washington suburban sanitary commission, which provides safe drinking water and sewer treatment to parts of Maryland, said that its technicians may be delayed due to the outage, and some customers may have trouble making their water bill payments.

Microsoft has said it is “deeply sorry” for the disruption caused by the outage, which it said was caused by “a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents”.

The company said in a statement:

We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.

This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions.

Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.

We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete.

As my colleagues explain, UK politicians and experts have said that the Microsoft outage has laid bare the world’s dangerous dependence on cloud services provided by a few massive US tech companies – Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

This reliance has been a growing source of unease through each high-profile outage. It has grown more pronounced because of the hostility of the Trump administration towards Europe, which has prompted some governments to consider alternatives to US software.

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

Mark Gregory, an associate professor at Australia’s RMIT University, said it was important for organisations to thoroughly test updates before rolling them out to the live network. That was 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 said companies that relied 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.

Around the world, it has become increasingly clear that many companies – and government services – do not have good backups, with businesses resorting to faxes and phones.

The Forrester analyst Dario Maisto said the outage “represents the perfect quasi-natural experiment for stress testing an organisation’s – and even an entire continent’s – digital sovereignty posture”, forcing governments to consider what might happen if mailing services and key tools such as Copilot were interrupted.

Josh Taylor, Aisha Down and Mark Sweney

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

The outage has lasted for more than 21 hours, with meaningful signs of recovery visible beginning shortly before midday GMT on Friday. It affected businesses, government agencies and even Microsoft employees all over the world. Those reporting issues have included the US House of Representatives, an Australian spy agency, airlines in India, European government agencies, and police services, ambulances and hospitals in the UK.

Microsoft is still investigating the cause of the outage, which it has said is not a cyber-attack but a configuration error. While the effects of the incident are global, they are also patchy; some users are still able to access some aspects of Microsoft’s service, and service is resuming in some parts of the world faster than in others. Microsoft said it continued to see improvements, with “email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels”, but some users may still experience issues.

What happened with Microsoft?

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.

The outage has lasted for more than 21 hours at the time of reporting, with significant recovery beginning at 11:20 GMT on Friday, according to data shared by the research firm Infoblox.

By 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.

By midday UK time, Microsoft said there was “encouraging recovery progress in Europe”, improvements in North America and Asia Pacific, and Japan was “stable”.

What caused the Microsoft outage?

Microsoft has said that this was not the result of a cyber-attack, though suspicions were high because of a number of cyber-attacks that have hit organisations in Europe in recent weeks. So far, the problem appeared to be a configuration update that 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.

More details are likely to emerge over the coming weeks. “We don’t know what actually went wrong, and that will take weeks to discover,” said Steven Murdoch, a professor of security engineering at University College London. “The people who are working on it are too busy fixing to understand or report on the cause.”

Murdoch said there was likely to be a proper postmortem on an outage of this size, but not for a few weeks.

Why has Microsoft 365 been down for so long?

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.

Murdoch said an outage of this size was usually “the result of some surprising interaction between systems. Each of the systems is normally quite well understood but interactions between them are complex and frequently the cause of large outages like this.

“It’s very hard to build a complex system without there being some risk of some failure.”

My colleagues answer more essential questions here:

In an update for consumers, Microsoft said:

We’re observing signs of sustained recovery throughout the affected environment, and while our investigation into the underlying root cause is ongoing, we’re continuing to monitor the impacted services to verify service health levels remain stable. This issue impacts Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web although you may also see issues in other Microsoft 365 services.”

While the world’s IT departments scramble to get things back up and running, some brands have been quick to jump on the chaos by sharing a wave of memes.

“Microsoft being down is the equivalent of an adult snow day right?!” Aldi UK wrote on Facebook.

“Whoever’s troubleshooting and working on the outage rn … take your time. Go out and get a Whopper,” said Burger King.

KitKat, meanwhile:

Another incremental update from Microsoft at just before 4pm GMT:

Current Status: We remain focused on addressing residual impact and ensuring reliable service restoration. We continue to assess recovery across various connection methodsand are closely monitoring service health to verify sustained stability.”

Small business owners and employees have been telling the Guardian how the Microsoft outage has affected them, with some services now being restored but concerns growing about the knock-on effects in the days ahead, my colleagues Nicola Slawson and Alfie Packham report.

Edward Holliday, a small business owner in West Yorkshire providing fire safety advice, says his emails started pinging again about 2.15pm. Until then, he had been unable to complete reports or respond to requests for quotes from potential clients.

“During the week I picked up a number of requests for quotes and just couldn’t get back to them,” he says, adding that there is a worry he’ll potentially lose out on that business now.

Although he managed to get some other work done during the outage and he didn’t lose any emails, he is now facing a backlog that he expects will spill into the weekend as he still needs to send out the quotes to potential clients and finish the reports he was unable to access.

“That’s the beauty of working for yourself,” he says.

Holliday says he is also concerned about what caused the outage, particularly given the recent spate of cyber-attacks.

“It would worry me if I thought that Microsoft were vulnerable to a cyber-attack,” he says. “Obviously my whole business exists within the Microsoft environment.”

Meanwhile, Sandra Wright, who works for a family-run cleaning supplies business in Kent, says the disruption could have consequences for supply chains, with the company unable to place orders.

The company has been unable to place orders with suppliers, potentially disrupting its usual delivery schedules.

“Although it is merely a day, a lot of companies, especially ones who operate via outsourced warehousing, have certain order days, be it for their weekly, fortnightly or monthly slots,” she says.

“Today alone would have had a ripple effect on these order dates.”

The outage has also left colleagues anxious about what might happen next, with some fearing further disruption despite Microsoft saying the problems were not caused by a cyber-attack.

“Today’s occurrence with Microsoft shows that nothing is untouchable,” Wright says, adding that staff are concerned about the wider repercussions for businesses that rely heavily on email.

Hugo Pickering, a business owner in Oxfordshire, says the outage today prevented him from accessing payroll data, meaning his 12 staff had to wait for their pay.

“As they are mainly on real living wage rate, it is bad news if they don’t get their pay accurately paid in a timely fashion,” he says.

Universities and other educational institutions in the UK are reporting that email access and related services appear to be getting back to normal this afternoon.

The University of Manchester has told staff and students: “Microsoft have announced that they are seeing encouraging recovery progress in Europe, with service availability and email delivery performance improving. We are starting to see improvements in the delivery of some emails across the university and other services are starting to recover.

“IT services are continuing to monitor, although please note that there may be delays to delivery of some emails.”

Meanwhile the Office for Students, England’s higher education regulator, said its email access had been restored but noted: “We understand that some institutions and individuals may continue to experience intermittent problems.”

When digital technology lets you down, sometimes you have to go analogue. Companies affected by Microsoft’s outage have urged people to switch to alternative methods of communication, like picking up the phone.

Reuters had the following report:

European exchange operator Euronext, which runs bourses in Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Oslo, Athens and Milan, told listed companies to pick up the phone.

“We have ensured that the team has sufficient capacity to manage the situation and handle the additional workload,” a spokesperson said, adding that Euronext was verifying the identity of callers to protect confidentiality and integrity.

Aviva, which reported earnings on Friday, said it had put backup plans in place, including sending out alternative phone numbers for earnings calls ‌and using Bluetooth to transfer recordings because email was down.

The British insurer tested a similar-scale outage of its most critical technology systems about two weeks ago, CEO Amanda Blanc told Reuters.

Shipping group Maersk asked customers to call with anything urgent and urged them ​to verify any unexpected communications about the outage with their local representative.

In Taiwan, the outage disrupted fund management at securities firms, life insurers and investment trust companies, people familiar with the situation said.

At another financial firm, trades such as purchases and sales of short-term bills, which are normally confirmed by email, had to be confirmed by fax instead, one of the people said.