Health services, schools, police departments and companies worldwide reported disruptions to their work. The cause was unclear, though Microsoft appeared to rule out a cyberattack.
The global outage affecting Microsoft services reverberated around the world on Friday, upending services relied upon by millions of people. Parents struggled to contact their children’s schools, some government services faltered and many office workers could not access email as the disruptions stretched into a second day.
Microsoft said in updates Friday that it was making progress in fixing the problem. By 9 a.m. Eastern, it said that service was being restored and in some cases was “approaching normal levels.”
The company did not specify what had caused the outage, but appeared to rule out a cyberattack, saying it had seen “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.”
A range of Microsoft tools were affected, including the email manager Outlook, the workplace messaging and video calling app Teams and the A.I. assistant Copilot. By early Friday, Microsoft said that the core functions of Teams and Copilot were online.
The outage made clear the extent to which many organizations depend on the company, which said in January that it had 450 million paid subscriptions to its Microsoft 365 suite of programs, which were the worst affected. Corporate offices, government agencies and other services in dozens of countries were forced to adapt as workers struggled to complete the everyday tasks intertwined with its products.
In Britain, the National Health Service said the outage was having a “disruptive impact” on its services. In Australia, intelligence and police forces said that their operations had been affected. Singapore told its taxpayers that email capabilities had been disrupted, and the Supreme Court of the Philippines and the European Court of Human Rights said the outage could cause delays in their work.
