Microsoft 365 Down? Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot Outage Enters Day Two With No Full Fix in Sight

A global Microsoft 365 outage moved into its second day on Friday. Businesses, governments and schools around the world were still struggling to use the cloud software they depend on for email, meetings, file sharing and documents. Microsoft reported progress but still had not said when full service would return.

The disruption began shortly before 1 p.m. ET Thursday. It hit a wide range of products in Microsoft's subscription suite, including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and the Copilot AI assistant. Outage tracker Downdetector said problem reports reached 74 countries and territories within about an hour.

Microsoft has ruled out a cyberattack but has not identified a root cause.

"We're seeing encouraging recovery progress in Europe," the company said in a status update Friday morning. It said Japan was more stable and North America was improving, though some users were still seeing intermittent problems.

A suite that runs the modern office

Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office 365, is a subscription service. It gives users access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams on computers, phones and the web, along with business services such as SharePoint for document sharing and OneDrive for cloud storage.

Because so many of those tools are linked, a failure in one core system quickly spread to the rest.

Microsoft said the outage affected multiple Microsoft 365 services that rely on Exchange Online, its cloud email system. In an update shortly after 7 a.m. ET Friday, the company warned that users may still be unable to connect to Outlook on the web or desktop, or to many services that interact with email.

Microsoft's consumer products were also affected. The company said the problems hit Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web.

Business users ran into a range of smaller faults as well. Links rewritten by Microsoft's Safe Links security feature would not open, releasing quarantined emails could fail, and creating live and virtual events in Teams did not work.

At the peak of the outage, Downdetector logged 19,650 reports per minute across Outlook, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, Copilot and Teams. On a typical Thursday the figure is fewer than 15.

'Service capacity has not yet returned to normal'

Microsoft engineers worked through the night as fixes repeatedly fell short.

The company said several servers had become unexpectedly unavailable and that the heavy load on its systems was not caused by more customer traffic. When servers failed, traffic was rerouted to others, which then became overloaded. Servers brought back online were swamped by reconnection traffic and failed again.

Early Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing signs of stabilization but that "service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels."

The company later said it was "seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure."

"At this time, we are not aware of any malicious activity causing this incident," Microsoft said.

Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform, apologized to customers on X. "We regret that today's outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue," he wrote. "There is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had told him the incident resembled the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, describing it as "an update that has gone awry."

Microsoft said it would publish a full post-incident report once the problem is fixed. It extended its email timeout window to 48 hours so that delayed messages would not bounce back to senders.

Global ripple effect

The outage disrupted work across continents.

In Japan, government ministries went back to paper. Government systems in Singapore were also hit. The Supreme Court of the Philippines warned of delays, and Australia's spy agency and federal police were among those affected.

In Hong Kong, staff at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs were locked out of email and Teams. Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa lost email support channels. Electric vehicle maker Workhorse postponed its earnings call.

Britain's Parliament said it was working with Microsoft and using other ways to communicate. U.S. city governments, including Miami Beach and Austin, asked residents to call instead of emailing.

Microsoft's own employees were also unable to send email during the downtime, according to reports.

The disruption spread to third-party services that plug into Microsoft 365. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude reported problems with their Microsoft 365 connectors. Outside apps that sync with Outlook Calendar were also affected.

Banks including Standard Chartered and ING Australia warned customers to watch for scammers posing as tech support. Email security systems that would normally catch such messages were themselves disrupted.

A troubled year for Microsoft 365

The outage is the latest in a string of Microsoft 365 failures in 2026.

In January, the service was down across North America for almost 10 hours. Microsoft blamed heavy load combined with reduced capacity during maintenance.

In July, a faulty network configuration change caused about five hours of degraded access to Microsoft 365 services routed through North America, affecting SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Copilot Chat and other tools.

In late August, a faulty core authentication configuration triggered a disruption that stretched over roughly 77 hours, hitting Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The repeated incidents have raised questions about how much risk organisations take on by running so much of their work through a single cloud provider.

RMIT University associate professor Mark Gregory said companies should thoroughly test updates before rolling them out to live networks and keep backup options for outages.

The outage came as European Union leaders met in Dublin to discuss reducing their dependence on foreign technology. Analysts said the disruption could add pressure to find alternatives, though they did not expect an immediate hit to Microsoft's revenue because of long-term licensing contracts.

What users and IT teams can do

Microsoft said services will come back gradually as capacity is restored and apps reconnect. Users are advised to:

• Restart Microsoft 365 apps from time to time so they can reconnect as service returns.
• Use files already synced to their devices through OneDrive, and emails already downloaded in desktop Outlook.
• Use phone calls or other platforms for urgent communication.
• Ignore unsolicited offers of technical help and check status only through Microsoft's official channels.

IT administrators can follow the incident through the service health dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin centre.

Microsoft has not given a timeline for full recovery.