A Microsoft logo and sign outside the Microsoft Visitor Center at the company’s headquarters on Monday, Nov. 9, 2026, in Redmond, Washington.
Lindsey Wasson/AP
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Lindsey Wasson/AP
Millions of people, organizations and businesses, including NPR’s newsroom, were left without access to Microsoft’s Outlook email on Thursday.
Early Friday morning, after Outlook had been down for more than 12 hours, Microsoft reported “Marginal success.”
Very little is known so far about what’s behind the outage, but Microsoft has attributed it to “high load” or servers becoming overloaded. The tech giant assured users that it was doing everything it could to fix the issue.
“At this time, we are not aware of any malicious activity causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until it is fully resolved,” the company said.
While Microsoft did not say how many users were affected, Microsoft 365 apps have about 430 million users worldwide. Its Teams communications platform and AI chatbot Copilot were also affected.
The problem has affected users in more than 70 countries, according to down detectorthat tracks cyber disruptions. Countries from the United States to South Africa, India and New Zealand were affected.
The US House of Representatives said it was also affected, as were the Australian police and the Japanese government. In Hong Kong, bankers told CNN their work was disrupted. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic were also affected.
While some people were furious, others online said they were relishing the opportunity to finish work early before the weekend.
Social media was filled with memes of people slacking off at work or enjoying quiet scenes without the ping of a constant barrage of emails, with some telling Microsoft technicians not to rush into fixing it.
