Microsoft Outage May Be One of History's Worst, Expert Warns

A widespread global outage affecting Microsoft 365 services began midday on Thursday, impacting email, cloud, and AI systems. The disruption crippled operations for schools, police departments, and courts internationally, while preventing doctors from sending critical patient updates and blocking bank transfers. Microsoft stated that the issue stemmed from a server infrastructure problem causing automated health checks to fail rather than increased traffic. Although recovery efforts and extended email timeouts were implemented, the company struggled for hours to restore full access, leading cybersecurity experts to label the incident one of the largest tech outages of all time.