Microsoft outage hits 70 countries, disrupting Teams, Outlook, and OneDrive

Microsoft experienced massive service outages on Thursday affecting multiple tools including Teams, Outlook, Copilot, and OneDrive, leaving hundreds of millions of users unable to access them across over 70 countries. The company cited server overload after others became unexpectedly unavailable, with essential UK services like ambulances, doctors, and pharmacies impacted. Schools and police advised phone contact instead of email. Microsoft reported encouraging recovery progress in Europe, with Japan relatively stable and North America improving. Downdetector recorded approximately 43,000 reports by Friday morning GMT and 130,000 in the US overnight. With roughly 430 million people using Office365 for daily tasks like Word files, the scale of disruption was substantial, though Microsoft has not disclosed exact affected numbers.