Microsoft Claims 36-Hour Tech Disruption Of Global Work Productivity Has Been Resolved

Microsoft says it has restored Outlook after an outage that lasted roughly 36 hours, disrupting work for users around the world. The incident affected services in multiple countries and institutions, illustrating how widely organisations rely on Microsoft’s email and calendar systems.

The outage began at about 11:17 a.m. EST on Thursday and Downdetector recorded reports across 74 countries and territories within an hour. Microsoft attributed the issue to an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a network change, said there was no evidence of malicious activity and promised an incident report. Reported effects included health services in the UK, law enforcement in Australia, tax transactions in Singapore and work in the US Congress.