Microsoft global outage stretches into second day as services slowly rec…

Microsoft struggles to restore services as a global outage enters its second day, disrupting users, businesses, hospitals, and governments worldwide.

Microsoft Cloud Crisis Cascades Globally

A technology failure that began on Thursday around 1 p.m. ET has stretched into a second day. Microsoft said the outage specifically hit features tied to Exchange Online — its cloud-based email and scheduling hub — leaving unconnected applications operational.

The incident knocked out a broad array of tools, including Outlook email, Teams, SharePoint Online, and the company's Copilot artificial intelligence assistant. TechCrunch reported that the outage also affected Defender security screening software, internal Intune dashboards, and some cloud-based Windows computers.

Online outage monitors showed that online services were disrupted in at least 74 countries. Microsoft 365 has more than 430 million paid users worldwide.

Global Disruption Hits Hospitals, Transport, and Government Services

The fallout rippled across critical infrastructure internationally. In Canada, the outage has affected hospitals, universities, government departments and transportation services.

Unity Health Toronto declared a "code grey" on Thursday, indicating an infrastructure failure. The hospital network said staff were having difficulty sending and receiving emails, but patient care was not affected. Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and University Health Network also reported email disruptions. In Montreal, the CHUM hospital said the outage affected appointment requests and some internal activities, and the Jewish General Hospital was also affected.

Via Rail said some customers were not receiving emails about their trips and advised passengers to check its train tracker or sign up for text notifications. Several post-secondary institutions, including the University of Toronto, Seneca Polytechnic and George Brown Polytechnic, also reported email problems. Some federal government departments and Toronto city hall also experienced email disruptions.

The disruption extended internationally. The Japanese government reported having issues, and Australia's intelligence agency also reported disruptions. In the United Kingdom, some health-care providers have been unable to share patient records between services. Airlines have also reported difficulties communicating with customers, while some businesses in Asia have struggled to receive orders.

Recovery Efforts and Investigation into Root Causes

Doug Madory, the director of internet analysis at Kentik, a company that monitors internet traffic worldwide, said in a post on Bluesky that traffic was returning to Microsoft's services after about 18 hours of downtime.

By Friday morning on the U.S. East coast, Microsoft’s Outlook email service had begun to recover and some emails have been trickling in. In its latest status page update, Microsoft said recovery efforts are going well:

“We’re seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements now observed in North America and sustained improvements across much of Europe. We’re also seeing encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, although some users may continue to experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure.”

Regarding the cause, Microsoft stated that the outage was caused by server issues involving “a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable,” with no indication or evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity. Senior Verge correspondent Tom Warren reported that the outage is linked to Azure VNet config changes, though Microsoft has not yet finalized its formal root-cause analysis.

Market Repercussions and Reliability Concerns

Microsoft shares fell 1.7 per cent before the bell, lagging the broader market. They have gained roughly eight per cent so far this year.

"The bigger worry is that this is not the first Microsoft 365 outage this year," said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro. "If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider's hands."

Microsoft faced an outage with its 365 services in January this year and also in October of last year, alongside a September incident affecting cloud services.