Microsoft outage reactions: The world woke up with Outlook still down. The memes are incredible.

Updated on Friday, Nov. 13 at 10:22 a.m. ET — Outlook service appears to be gradually returning for some users. Some U.S. users took to social media to lament the fact that they’re able to do their jobs again.

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Microsoft‘s major global outage seems like it’s winding down, as of Friday morning. The issue wasn’t solved overnight, and some Microsoft users in the UK woke up with broken inboxes — and got to work making memes. However, by the time Americans woke up and started their Friday, service was returning to normal.

Users worldwide started reporting issues with Microsoft 365 enterprise software products, including Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, around 5:30 p.m. GMT on Nov. 12, according to Downdetector. At the time of writing, major Microsoft services are still experiencing problems, per Microsoft’s official status page, but the company is seeing “sustained improvements in service availability.”

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), that meant many American users had to get back to work on Friday morning. Social media was full of appropriate memes, as a result.

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People in the UK were not as lucky, as services were still broadly offline when they woke up. UK users hit social media to react to the news and touch grass like the rest of the world (or for serious information-sharing purposes).

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Schools and universities, NHS emergency services, pharmacies, GPs, and care services, transport, charities, businesses, museums, and government offices around the country have been affected by the outage. Surgical procedures have had to be rescheduled, per Bloomberg. The Metropolitan Police website currently says that “some online form submissions may be affected” due to the Microsoft outage.

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The Royal Mail, however, took a moment to be smug.

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Microsoft is regularly updating its official status page and social media channels, and Mashable is covering the story as it happens.

On Friday, in response to Mashable’s questions about the outage, Microsoft provided a statement expressing regret for the disruption.

“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure,” said Charles Lamanna, EVP, Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft. “We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.”

This story is developing…

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