One Company's Servers Fail, Governments Go Dark

Microsoft says it has had only "marginal success" restoring its most widely used workplace services, more than 12 hours after a global outage knocked out Outlook and disrupted Teams and Copilot for users in 74 countries. The supposed fixes aren't working. Servers Microsoft restored were failing again by Friday morning in Europe.

Who Has the Power

The trouble began at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users couldn't open their email. Within about an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. Government systems in Singapore and Japan went down. Communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines were disrupted. In Australia, the country's spy agency and federal police were among the organisations hit.

Think about that for a second. Intelligence services, courts and police forces all hung their daily operations on one corporation's servers, and when those servers stumbled, the apparatus stumbled with them. Microsoft hasn't published a root cause. It said only that it was rolling back a network change, and didn't say whether that change was to blame.

Walter Pasquarelli, an affiliate researcher at the Bennett School of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, put the scale in perspective. "There's about 430 million people who use Microsoft services," he said. Microsoft itself hasn't confirmed how many were affected. Downdetector had at least 43,000 Outlook reports from 72 countries by about 07:00 GMT on Friday, a figure that only counts people who bothered to visit the site and file a complaint. "The true number is likely far higher," the count's own caveat runs.

Who Gets Crushed

There's little users can do. The problem sits on Microsoft's servers, not on anyone's own device. People can't open mailboxes through the web, the app or their phones, and many emails that do go through arrive late. The disruption also spread to integrations that other companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, rely on.

"For the most part, we don't really think about it too much, a little bit like our health, that we kind of take these tools for granted until they're suddenly down or they're not there," Pasquarelli said.

Rupert Goodwins, a technology analyst and journalist, pointed to what's been lost inside the company. "It's not so much that there aren't enough human eyes, but all the experienced people, the people who built the stuff up, have left," he said. "There's been a draining of corporate memory of how these systems are built up and how they work." He also said Microsoft's all-in bet on AI may have played an indirect role. "I imagine that the stuff like email and Teams, they're just seen as forgotten revenue source. They won't have got the investment and thought and management mind space they should have done," he said. "It does also show that for all Microsoft's AI, it hasn't got any AI that can help fix the networks."

This isn't new. In January, Microsoft 365 went down across North America for almost 10 hours. In late August, thousands of Outlook users worldwide were locked out of their mailboxes. An Amazon Web Services outage took down a large number of websites and apps one year ago, in October 2025. And the CrowdStrike update that crashed computers worldwide, cancelling flights and disrupting hospitals, hit two years ago, in July 2024, with billions of dollars in losses.

The Sovereignty Shuffle

Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke told a Sydney news conference that Microsoft believes it's dealing with something similar to CrowdStrike, "where there is an update that has gone awry." Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, posted on X that there's "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."

Europe's answer is "digital sovereignty." Earlier this year, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said government officials would stop using Zoom and other US-owned video conferencing tools in favour of French software, partly to reduce "dependencies on non-European actors." It's a swap of one landlord for another. The dependency on centralised, institutional infrastructure stays put.

Goodwins didn't expect much to change. Microsoft has relied on "intensive inertia," he said. "People feel they have to stick with Microsoft because the pain of transitioning somewhere else is too great." Customers are tied into licensing contracts, so he didn't expect an immediate hit to revenue. "It's quarter-by-quarter business here, it won't," he said. Pasquarelli said he could envisage a short dip in the company's shares, but that organisations are more likely to "focus more on their digital resilience instead of building something of their own."

The fix Pasquarelli offered was a question each organisation should ask itself: "What is the minimum viable service or the minimum viable product that we need to keep up if there's a global outage?" Microsoft, meanwhile, has given no timeline for full recovery.