Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Outlook globally for over 18 hours

A global Microsoft outage has disrupted Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services for over 18 hours, affecting businesses worldwide, with investigations ongoing and no evidence of malicious activity found. The outage began Thursday, peaking with over 130,000 US outage reports on Downdetector. Microsoft attributed the issue to servers failing automated health checks due to a specific component, causing an "elevated load" on remaining infrastructure, and has implemented traffic adjustments and recovery systems. Microsoft reports "encouraging recovery progress" in Europe, Japan, and North America, though intermittent issues may persist. The company has extended email timeouts to 48 hours to preserve delayed mail and will release a full post-incident report after mitigation is complete.