Microsoft services hit by major outage across the world

A massive global outage impacting more than a dozen Microsoft cloud services, including Outlook email and Teams messaging stretched into Friday as the tech giant struggled to restore the service, which is critical to the day-to-day functions of governments, schools and businesses around the world.

Starting around 12:50 p.m. ET Thursday, Microsoft began warning users of its products on social media that it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online,” its cloud email service.

More than 12 hours later, Microsoft said it was still working on the problem.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” it said in an update on X.

Some on the social media platform derided the technical responses, or hoped email would be down Friday for a possible day off.

There are few products as pervasive inside global companies as Outlook email.

Email traffic to many of the tech giant’s 450 million users came to a halt around midday, with email programs freezing and crashing, and mobile devices unable to refresh inboxes or send messages.

The problems also affected Microsoft’s non-commercial consumer products, according to a notice on its website. “This issue…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/world