From early weekend celebration to Slack and call switch: How employees navigated Microsoft outage

Operations were disrupted at Microsoft offices on Friday as the firm battled to fix a massive outage and thousands of users reported issues globally. Microsoft employees struggled to continue their work as the outage affected Outlook, Teams, and Copilot artificial intelligence (AI) service, among others.

While some US office workers reportedly celebrated the email blackout and joked about an early weekend, others found alternative ways to stay connected with colleagues, turning to Slack, phone calls and face-to-face conversations, according to a CNN report.

In the US, workers at some companies reportedly went home early on Thursday. Meanwhile, in Australia, the outage affected businesses, courtroom live streams, and online classes, leaving some schools unable to conduct lessons on Friday, the publication added.

Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas," but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected “Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region”. According to Downdetector, Microsoft services were knocked out in 74 countries and territories at one point.

Also Read | Microsoft outage: Outlook, Copilot and Teams remain disrupted, over 200,000 user issues reported Microsoft, in a post on X on Friday morning (IST), said that the steps to fix the outage are not going 'as expected'.

"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected. We're identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," the post read.

Under the update by Microsoft, an X user commented jokingly, "@realDonaldTrump it’s not too late to declare a federal holiday for Friday the 13th. We can call it Microsoft 364 Day." Also Read | Microsoft outage: Users report issues with Outlook, Microsoft 365, Store and other apps Meanwhile, Burger King on its official X handle, without naming any company, posted, "Whoever’s troubleshooting and working on the outage rn…take your time.

go out and get a Whopper." On the other hand, X was flooded with reactions from users posting about the outage. "Happy Microsoft outage to everyone who celebrates," a netizen said. "Microsoft outage on a Friday," another X user posted.

"When Microsoft cancels all your meetings for you. Thank you, outage," a post on X read. Also Read | Microsoft gives initial explanation for outage; says ‘servers were unexpectedly unavailable’ Microsoft Outlook suffered an outage, with users struggling to access their email, as the company said it was working to reduce the impact.

Downdetector tracked a peak of about 2,00,000 reports of user issues across Microsoft services shortly after 1 pm New York time, according to a Bloomberg report.