Microsoft 365 Crawls Back to Life After a 24-Hour Outage
The company says a bad update—not a cyberattack or AI—caused its servers around the world to crash.
Microsoft's cloud services, Microsoft 365, experienced a widespread outage that impacted businesses, governments, and millions of users worldwide. The disruption began on Thursday afternoon on the East Coast, with users reporting issues with Outlook just after 12 pm ET. Within an hour, Microsoft confirmed an investigation into the issue, which initially appeared to be localized to North America but quickly expanded to impact over 70 countries.
Despite the extensive impact, the company ruled out a cyberattack or AI agents as the cause, stating that the outage stemmed from a technical problem during a network capacity upgrade following a recent network change. Microsoft has assured users that recovery and stability are underway, and a comprehensive post-incident report is in progress.
However, users may experience a surge of notifications as systems come back online. The outage has already had significant repercussions, including disruptions to government functions, airline communications, law enforcement, emergency services, and hospitals. This incident highlights the critical dependence on Microsoft's systems for modern life and the inherent risks of relying on a single provider for a vital service.
Experts warn that the aftermath may bring unforeseen challenges, making delayed emails a mere minor concern.
Written by urgent.news from Wired's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
