Millions of office workers got an unexpected break from their emails on Thursday. Their bosses’ new favorite AI tool also has one.
A Microsoft (MSFT) outage that began at midday Thursday knocked out Outlook and other business applications around the world, with Downdetector taking in reports from 74 countries in about an hour. On Friday, Microsoft said it had seen “encouraging progress in recovery.”
The damage has reached Microsoft’s AI. Copilot couldn’t access users’ emails, files, or calendars, and the Microsoft connectors for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude (ANTH.PVT) also broke.
Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its Microsoft 365 apps.
What this means for you
Your email is not lost. Microsoft has extended its email expiration time to 48 hours, so messages sent to you keep trying to be delivered instead of bouncing.
There’s not much to fix on your end. Resetting your password or reinstalling Outlook won’t help, although Outlook on the desktop can still show already downloaded mail.
If your business pays for Microsoft 365, it may be owed money. Microsoft promises 99.9% uptime, or about 43 minutes of downtime per month, with credits ranging from 25% to 100% of the monthly rate in case of failure. Your IT department should file the complaint.
Not the first time
Microsoft is hard to replace, which is generally good news for its shareholders. Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman, whose fund owns Microsoft shares, said Thursday on Yahoo Finance Invest that Microsoft is “the gateway to how people interact with the basic workflows of an office worker,” making it “a much harder position to dislodge.”
This week showed the other side of the situation.
Microsoft has blamed its own changes or maintenance for Microsoft 365 disruptions in at least six months this year, from a nearly 10-hour outage in January to a spam filter update that bounced real emails earlier this month.
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was dealing with “an update gone wrong”, much like the 2024 collapse of CrowdStrike.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Microsoft looked for the older patch in the help desk manual, saying Thursday that it was “rebooting the affected servers to get them back into service.”
It didn’t stick. The servers that came back crashed again once traffic returned. On Friday, Microsoft attributed the outage to an issue “from an earlier network capacity upgrade” that emerged after a recent network change, and said it was “deeply sorry for the disruption.”
What we know about layoffs
The outage comes as Microsoft cuts its workforce while spending heavily on AI. Microsoft offered buyouts to about 60,000 employees in October, and those who agree to leave on December 31. CEO Satya Nadella said last year that AI writes “maybe 20, 30 percent” of Microsoft’s code.
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