One Company's Servers Fail, Police and Clinics Go Dark

A failure in part of Microsoft's server infrastructure cut people off from Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services for more than a day, with problems reported in 74 countries and territories. It began on Thursday afternoon European time. By Friday morning it still wasn't fixed. Microsoft says there's no sign of a cyber attack. It hasn't named a root cause.

Here's what 'more than a day' looked like on the ground. In the UK, GPs, police and pharmacies were among the services affected. Some GP surgeries told patients not to submit messages through their websites, and several large police forces told the public to pick up the phone. At Westminster, MPs said their access to Microsoft products through parliamentary accounts was down. Gloucestershire NHS Foundation Trust said staff were 'temporarily unable to send or receive emails.' BSW Community Health said it was running on 'tried and tested business continuity plans.' NHS England's advice to patients: use 999 in an emergency, call 111, or go to a local pharmacy.

One Update, Everyone Down

The trouble started at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users couldn't reach Outlook. Within about an hour Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. At its peak, nearly 140,000 Outlook problem reports came in. Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its 365 apps; the full scale of the outage hasn't been confirmed.

The company's explanation shifted as the hours passed. First it said it was investigating problems in the Americas. Then it blamed 'elevated load' on its servers across multiple regions, then said servers had become 'unexpectedly unavailable' and that the load hadn't come from extra traffic. Next it was testing a configuration change to stop servers failing automated health checks. On Friday it was rolling back a network change, without saying whether that change was the culprit. Servers brought back overnight crashed again once traffic returned, and Microsoft admitted its changes were 'not taking as expected.' By Friday morning: 'marginal success.'

Australia's Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft told him it believed it was dealing with something 'similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry.' Professor James Ferryman of the University of Reading said the part of the servers that sets up secure connections is getting swamped and 'this kind of failure snowballs.' Euronews noted similar Microsoft 365 outages in January and August. Al Jazeera said the January one lasted almost 10 hours across North America.

Who Gets Crushed

Euronext, the European stock market operator, told listed companies on Friday morning to use the phone for corporate information. Deutsche Bahn struggled to send out timetables for diverted trains. In the US, House of Representatives staff said their work was halted, the City of Austin said employees couldn't send or receive email while 911 wasn't affected, and courts from Los Angeles to Texas warned of delays. Australia's spy and federal police agencies were hit. The Supreme Court of the Philippines was disrupted. Some Japanese companies reportedly turned to fax machines. In Canada, Unity Health Toronto declared a 'code grey,' with patient care not affected.

Smaller outfits don't get a spokesperson. South African winemaker Peter Pentz said his business was at a 'standstill.' At the Cop31 climate conference in Antalya, Turkey, James Young of the Inuit Circumpolar Council said it was 'really frustrating and challenging to maintain contact with our colleagues.'

Who Was Fine

POLITICO reported that the European Commission, Council of the EU and European Parliament carried on largely unaffected. Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier called the impact 'very limited,' with 'minor impact on a limited number of applications, such as the slowness of SharePoint.' Claudia Plattner, head of Germany's BSI cybersecurity agency, said German authorities weren't affected because they didn't rely on Microsoft 365. Russia, where Microsoft applications are heavily restricted, was among the places unaffected, according to Downdetector.

Germany's Schleswig-Holstein moved about 40,000 mailboxes from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to open-source alternatives in 2025, one year ago. Its digitalization minister, Dirk Schrödter, said disruptions like this 'must be taken very seriously' and 'we must be able to intervene ourselves at any time if problems arise.' Professor Tommaso Valletti of Imperial Business School put it plainly: 'The episode shows once again the downside of depending so heavily on a handful of large US tech companies.'

By 14:00 GMT on Friday, Microsoft said email queues were 'significantly reduced and approaching normal levels,' though some users 'may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery.' It extended the email 'timeout window' to 48 hours. Delayed emails will carry the delivery time as their timestamp. Microsoft's executive vice president Charles Lamanna promised on X to 'continue to share more information as soon as we have it.' Gergely Orosz said he 'cannot recall' a business email outage taking this long to return to normal. Rupert Goodwins called it 'very embarrassing for Microsoft.' Embarrassing for Microsoft, and a day of phone calls, fax machines and 'business continuity plans' for everyone else.