Microsoft recently experienced nearly a-day outage significantly affecting worldwide operations businesses and governments. The outage affected Exchange Online-dependent Microsoft 365 features, Microsoft Outlook and Teams. The outage is currently one of the longest in Microsoft’s history. Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant was also disrupted. It has applied “fixes” to help correct the situation.
Downdetector determined the outage “reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour.” Banks, governments, airlines, health services were affected by the outage.
Microsoft so far, has ruled out any malicious activity causing the outage. Microsoft says it was a technical issue, not a cybersecurity breach or malicious activity
Clearly, the outage caused major disruption in work related activities for many as stated in a recent Reuters news article.
Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications with hundreds of millions of users. The outage prevented people from performing essential functions such as sending emails, managing calendars and hosting virtual meetings.
Although losses are not exactly known yet a Michigan think tank according to estimates losses from the event into the billions according to CNN news. Anderson Economic Group, a Michigan think tank, revealed the estimated cost of this recent outage.
Estimated lost productivity could approach $7 billion, based on roughly 26 million disrupted users Thursday and up to 51 million Friday.
Microsoft has experienced other similar outages recently. Other Microsoft services outages occurred in January of this year and in October 2025 according to Reuters news.
Microsoft apologized for the incident in an official X statement.