One Bad Day at Microsoft Stopped the World's Email

For most of Thursday and into Friday, a large chunk of the working world discovered what it actually runs on. Outlook stopped sending mail. Teams went dark. Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, fell over alongside the tools it is supposed to assist with. The UK's National Health Service told patients to keep their appointments but expect chaos, police forces asked the public to phone in crimes the old way, and schools from Glasgow to Melbourne lost their lesson platforms. At least 74 countries reported problems, and roughly 430 million people use these tools every day. One company's bad day became everyone's bad day, and that is the story. What actually happened Microsoft says it was not a cyberattack, just a technical failure. The company's own explanation is that higher-than-usual stress on its servers caused the collapse, with customers unable to send or receive email, open certain files or see their calendars from late Thursday. Restoration crawled along for nearly 24 hours; by Friday afternoon Microsoft was reporting encouraging progress in Europe and improving queues in North America, while warning that intermittent issues would linger. The painfully vague wording matters, beca...