Thousands of workers are facing significant disruption on Friday as Microsoft battles to restore its services following a worldwide outage that has left Outlook, Teams and its AI assistant Copilot unavailable for more than 14 hours.
The tech giant is working frantically to get its systems back online as businesses throughout Britain and Europe start the working day, with the disruption impacting users across 74 countries.
Partial recovery efforts
Microsoft said its efforts to remedy the problem had yielded only partial success, cautioning that services might become unresponsive again even after being brought back online.
"We're continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimisation actions to improve service stability and increase capacity," the company said. "We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact."
Reports of difficulties accessing Outlook reached nearly 140,000 worldwide around 6pm GMT on Thursday, according to monitoring website Downdetector, as reported by City AM.
Cause and impact
Microsoft blamed the disruption on servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which placed additional pressure on its remaining infrastructure. It ruled out a cyber attack.
The disruption threatens to throw a spanner in the works for British businesses that depend heavily on Microsoft's software for emails, meetings and internal communications. Swiss luxury goods giant Richemont was also compelled to postpone the release of its half-year financial results on Friday morning as a consequence of the outage, though it subsequently published the figures.
Microsoft 365 applications are used by more than 430 million people worldwide, while AI heavyweights OpenAI and Anthropic have also reported disruptions to services linked to Microsoft's infrastructure.
Wider consequences
Technology analyst Paul Spain cautioned that the disruption could prove to be the "most severe technology outage in history" should it persist beyond 24 hours, with the potential to affect billions of dollars worth of business operations.
The outage has already thrown banks, government agencies and courts across multiple countries into disarray, with some organisations left with no choice but to postpone operations.
The incident also arrives at a time when European governments are actively seeking to reduce their reliance on American technology providers and bolster their own domestic digital infrastructure.
Toby Murray, a computing professor at the University of Melbourne, highlighted the "inherent dangers" of such dependency, warning that a significant outage at a single provider could "dramatically reduce business productivity globally".
The disruption follows a separate outage at Microsoft's Azure cloud platform last month, and draws comparisons with the widespread IT failure of 2024, when a defective CrowdStrike update brought flights to a standstill and caused widespread disruption to banking services. The development arrives during a particularly difficult period for the US technology sector, following Nvidia's loss of almost $600bn in market capitalisation on Thursday after the departure of its long-standing chief executive Jensen Huang.
The chip manufacturer's dramatic fall contributed to a broader technology sell-off, with investors increasingly questioning whether the billions being invested in artificial intelligence will generate adequate returns.
