Microsoft 365 services are mostly working again after an outage that hit businesses, governments and other users worldwide, Wired reported on Friday. Wired said Outlook problems showed up on Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, just after 12 pm ET on Thursday. Microsoft first said the problem was limited to North America. Wired said it then spread to more than 70 countries. Wired's headline calls it a 24-hour outage. iTnews put it at 18 hours and said Outlook became reachable again around 10pm AEDT, starting with parts of Asia Pacific.
Microsoft said the problem began with an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which showed up after a recent network change. It said the outage was not linked to a cyberattack or to AI agents. Wired and iTnews both say the full cause is not yet public. Microsoft has promised a full post-incident report. It also extended its email timeout to 48 hours so delayed messages can still arrive. iTnews said some North American users may still see intermittent problems.
Wired said governments, airlines, emergency services and hospitals reported disruptions. iTnews said internet providers and government departments told customers they could not act on requests during the outage. For teams that run or buy Microsoft 365, the episode shows how much daily work stops when email and chat go down together.