A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services Thursday and Friday, affecting corporations, government agencies, universities, courts and hospital systems in the United States and abroad.
Several government agencies reported email disruptions, including Austin, Texas, which said employees could not send or receive emails, and Baltimore, Maryland, which warned that a global Microsoft outage was delaying city email. New York City’s Emergency Management Department also cautioned residents about potential delays in contacting city agencies and accessing online services.
Hospitals and educational institutions also reported problems. Toronto’s Unity Health network experienced disruptions to some email services, while the United Kingdom’s National Health Service said the outage was affecting operations. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom reported it was unable to receive emails, and Cambridge University said email, calendars and SharePoint had been impacted. Anthropic also reported disruptions to some services involving its Claude chatbot.
Microsoft apologized for the disruption Friday and said the outage was caused by a technical issue involving an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change.
