Email access failed for millions on Thursday afternoon when a network capacity upgrade introduced an issue into Exchange Online, halting core infrastructure around the world, Axios reported.
That includes Department of Justice lawyers: Government attorneys [asked] for an extension in the case brought by Rep. Joyce Beatty over President Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover, saying the outage prevented them from completing the necessary coordination. In a separate [filing], Beatty’s team acknowledged they were impacted as well, Axios reported.
Hope nobody needs Congress for a little while, your Legislative Branch is currently paralyzed by the Outlook outage
The impacts were also felt in courtrooms and offices internationally. U.K.-based police forces also urged the public to call first responders for aid, rather than using online forms, according to Axios. The Supreme Court of the Philippines said it, too, was affected by the outage.
“We obviously need backup methods to keep the wheels of justice turning,” said Gissou Nia, the founder and director of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Litigation Project.
We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
The disruption extended far beyond courtrooms into municipal offices and legislative bodies. Municipal governments in Austin, Texas, and [Jacksonville], Florida, among several others, warned that their emails and phone systems were impacted, Axios reported.
With Congress back in session, Hill communications were also left in a holding pattern, with one staffer writing on X that the legislative branch was paralyzed by the Outlook outage, according to Axios.
In the United Kingdom, NHS England hospital staff resorted to paper records, while ambulance services suffered a serious impact, The Guardian reported.
Microsoft issued an apology Friday for the wide-ranging outage, with a spokesperson saying they know the trust customers place in their services and take that responsibility extremely seriously, CNBC reported. The company ruled out cyberattacks or meddling from AI agents, stating that the disruption stemmed from an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade, according to Fox Business.
We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services. This was a technical issue…
Downdetector received outage reports from users in more than 70 countries and territories during the incident, according to The Guardian.
- Which services were affected by the disruption? Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint, and Copilot were largely down, along with multiple external services connecting to Microsoft products, CNBC reported.
- How many commercial subscriptions use the platform? Microsoft said in January it had more than 450 million paid commercial subscriptions to its 365 services, according to The Guardian.
We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure. We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages…