FACTBOX-Major tech outages in recent years

A major outage affected Microsoft's Outlook, Teams and Copilot on Thursday ​and Friday, disrupting communications for businesses and governments worldwide. It was the second Microsoft 365 ​disruption in 2026.

Here are some of the biggest tech outages ‌in ​recent years, in reverse chronological order: MICROSOFT

Outlook, Teams and Copilot were hit by a global outage affecting Microsoft 365 features on Thursday, which had stretched beyond 12 hours by 1100 GMT on Friday. Microsoft blamed server problems and said it was not aware of any malicious activity. The disruption ‌hit government agencies in Australia, Japan, and the US, and caused disruptions at trading firms, delays to companies publishing their results and airlines warning customers of delayed communication.

Microsoft had also faced an outage with its 365 services in January. In October last year, it reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide. CLOUDFLARE

The web-infrastructure company, whose ‌network handles about a fifth of web traffic, was hit by an outage preventing thousands of users from accessing platforms such as Canva, X, Grindr and ChatGPT on November 18, 2025. The ‌company said the outage was caused by an automatically generated configuration file, designed to manage potential security threats, which grew too large and crashed the software system handling traffic for several Cloudflare services.

AWS Amazon's cloud services unit, which hosts applications and computer processes for companies around the world, was hit by an outage on October 20, 2025, disrupting operations across multiple industries around the world and taking down several popular apps including Reddit and Snapchat.

The disruption knocked workers from London to Tokyo ⁠offline and halted ​others from conducting normal everyday tasks like paying hairdressers ⁠or changing their airline tickets. It was at least the third time in five years that AWS's northern Virginia cluster, known as US-EAST-1, contributed to a major internet meltdown.

CROWDSTRIKE A software update by global cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike triggered systems problems for ⁠Microsoft customers that resulted in hours-long global computer systems outages on July 19, 2024.

Services from airlines to healthcare, shipping and finance were impacted globally. After the outage was resolved, companies were left dealing with backlogs of delayed ​and cancelled flights and medical appointments, missed orders and other issues that took days to solve. X CORP

Social media platform Twitter suffered a major outage on December 28, 2022, leaving ⁠tens of thousands of users globally unable to access the platform or use its key features for several hours before services appeared to come back online. META

Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram went dark for six hours on October 4, ⁠2021, ​with 10.6 million users reporting problems worldwide. Meta said the outage was caused by a faulty configuration change. AKAMAI

Websites of dozens of financial institutions and airlines in Australia and the US were briefly down on June 17, 2021, due to server-related glitches at content delivery network provider Akamai. According to the firm, the problem was caused by a bug in its software. FASTLY

In June 2021, thousands ⁠of government, news and social media websites across the globe were hit by a widespread outage linked to US-based cloud company Fastly. The issue affected several high-traffic sites including Reddit, Amazon, CNN, ⁠PayPal, Spotify, Al Jazeera Media Network and the ⁠New York Times, with outages ranging from a few minutes to around an hour. ALPHABET

Some of Google's most popular services including YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive were down for an hour during an outage on December 14, 2020. According to outage monitoring website Downdetector, more than 12,000 YouTube users were ‌affected in various parts of the ‌world, including the US, Britain and India. (Compiled by Philippe Leroy Beaulieu, Eva Orsolya Papp and Alexander ​Klyve Gudbrandsen in Gdansk; Editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)