Millions of individuals, organizations, and businesses — including the NPR newsroom — were left without access to Microsoft's Outlook email on Thursday.

Early Friday, after Outlook had been down for more than 12 hours, Microsoft reported "marginal success."

Very little is known so far about what is behind the outage, but Microsoft has attributed it to an "elevated load," or servers becoming overstretched. The tech giant assured users it was doing everything it could to fix the problem.

"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution," the company said.

While Microsoft did not say how many users were affected, Microsoft 365 apps have around 430 million users globally. Its communications platform Teams and AI chatbot Copilot were also affected.

The problem has affected users in more than 70 countries, according to Downdetector, which tracks cyber outages. Countries from the U.S. to South Africa to India and New Zealand were affected.

The U.S. House of Representatives said it was also affected, as were the Australian police and the Japanese government. In Hong Kong, bankers told CNN their work was disrupted. Companies including OpenAI and Anthropic were also affected.

While some people were fuming, others online said they were relishing the opportunity to wind down work early ahead of the weekend.

Social media was full of memes of people slacking off at work or enjoying tranquil scenes without the pinging of a constant barrage of emails, with some telling the Microsoft technicians not to hurry with fixing it.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Collected from Minnesota Public Radio News. View original source here.