GoKawiilMicrosoft 365 outage stretches into second day, email delays extended to 48 hours
A disruption to Microsoft 365 services that began Thursday midday was still unresolved Friday morning, affecting email, cloud and AI tools. Microsoft extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to prevent message loss while recovery efforts continue, and said it has found no evidence of malicious activity, attributing the issue to failed server health checks.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
Former UK cybersecurity chief Ciaran Martin told NBC News the outage could rank among the largest ever, potentially exceeding recent disruptions at Amazon Web Services and CrowdStrike, given how deeply Microsoft 365 is embedded across hospitals, courts, police, banks and schools worldwide. With Microsoft reporting over 450 million paid subscriptions as of January, the episode underscores how concentrated reliance on a single cloud provider can create widespread vulnerability when outages strike critical public and financial services.
- The outage began Thursday midday and was still ongoing Friday morning, hitting email, cloud and AI services.
- Microsoft extended email timeouts to 48 hours to prevent lost messages and says the cause was failed server health checks, not malicious activity.
- Impacts spanned government agencies, hospitals, courts and banks globally, with Microsoft 365 having over 450 million paid subscriptions as of January.
Source: arstechnica.com, 2026-11-13
Published there as: “Microsoft’s global outage may be worse than Amazon's or CrowdStrike's, expert says”
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