Early Friday, Microsoft said it saw “encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” referring to its subscription service for apps such as Teams and Excel. However, the company said some users “may still experience intermittent issues” as the tech giant still works to get its services fully restored, with a focus on protecting delayed emails.
Microsoft was still racing on Friday to resolve an outage of services including Outlook and Teams that has disrupted governments, schools and businesses. The company said it has no indication of a cyberattack, but initial efforts to restore services have not resulted in sustained recovery.
According to outage tracker Downdetector, hundreds of thousands of users in more than 70 countries have reported problems. Microsoft first said it was investigating reports of problems encountered by users attempting to access their email on Thursday afternoon.
Maersk, one of the world’s biggest shipping companies, couldn’t send out some emails and notifications. Euronext, operator of several major European exchanges, couldn’t receive emails from some clients — though it said markets were functioning as normal. Microsoft Outlook services were disrupted at the House of Representatives in Washington, and its engineers were working with the company. A U.K. lawmaker said on Facebook most members of Parliament use Outlook and had lost access to their Outlook inboxes.
OpenAI said its ChatGPT service was affected and it was working to mitigate the impact. Anthropic flagged a similar issue affecting its Microsoft 365 connector and Claude for Outlook. “We’re investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected,” OpenAI said on its website.
The incident is the latest in recent months to show how the modern economy is vulnerable to outages in widely used tech systems. Unlike some other recent examples, such as the cyberattack on European fridges, the problems at Microsoft didn’t appear to have been caused by hackers. The company said there was no indication malicious activity was to blame.
Microsoft 365 is the descendant of Microsoft Office, the suite of products first launched by Bill Gates in the late 1980s. In its most recent quarterly results, Microsoft reported revenue of almost $28 billion from Microsoft 365, or 30% of the company’s total revenue in the three months through September. Shares in the company fell about 1% in premarket trading.
Users visiting some government websites, including in the U.S., were met with appeals for them to contact offices by phone. In Australia’s remote Northern Territory, where many classes are held online, education officials said schools were experiencing technical difficulties and urged people to be patient.
The Microsoft outage mirrors problems that hit Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services a year ago, roiling the systems that individuals and businesses use to communicate with each other. The Cloudflare outage in November 2025 knocked swaths of the internet offline, including social-media sites.
Experts said the latest outage highlights the importance of contingency planning. “Customers need a rehearsed plan for keeping essential work and communications going when their usual services are unavailable,” said Mohammad Goudarzi from the faculty of information technology at Australia’s Monash University.