Millions of people were unable to access their emails, Teams chats or meetings on Thursday night and Friday after a Microsoft 365 outage brought down services across the globe.

The outage has lasted for more than 21 hours, with meaningful signs of recovery visible beginning shortly before midday GMT on Friday. It affected businesses, government agencies and even Microsoft employees all over the world. Those reporting issues have included the US House of Representatives, an Australian spy agency, airlines in India, European government agencies, and police services, ambulances and hospitals in the UK.

Microsoft is still investigating the cause of the outage, which it has said is not a cyber-attack but a configuration error. While the effects of the incident are global, they are also patchy; some users are still able to access some aspects of Microsoft's service, and service is resuming in some parts of the world faster than in others. Microsoft said it continued to see improvements, with "email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels", but some users may still experience issues.

Experts say that the outage has laid bare the dangerous dependence of countries such as the UK on a few US tech companies.

What happened and why – and what does it say about online services in 2026?