Massive Microsoft outage disrupts businesses, schools and governments around the world

By Brian Stelter, Hilary Whiteman, Ramishah Maruf, CNN (CNN) — A massive Microsoft outage has left people around the world without access to Outlook email, Teams meeting tools and other staples of modern office life. In the United States, fed-up workers at some companies went home early on Thursday. In Australia, businesses couldn’t print invoices and some schools couldn’t hold online classes on Friday. And there was no quick fix. As of 3:30 a.m. GMT on Friday, the outage was still widespread, affecting untold millions of people. Microsoft is posting updates on X and on its “service health status” page. “We’re seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure and recover server availability in an isolated manner,” Microsoft said in an update at 1:59 a.m. GMT. But in another post at 3:13 a.m. GMT, the company said, “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected.” “We’re identifying alte