MICROSOFT'S OUTAGE IS ONE OF THE LONGEST IN ITS HISTORY A more than 16-hour outage of $MSFT Outlook and Teams crippled communications for businesses and governments worldwide on Friday, forcing some organizations back to fax machines and halting at least one bond repurchase in Europe, Reuters reported. Government agencies from Australia to Japan and the US were hit, along with Britain's NHS, which rescheduled procedures. Euronext asked listed companies to phone in, and OpenAI and Anthropic reported issues with Microsoft connectors. Microsoft blamed server problems, said it is not aware of any malicious activity, and reported signs of stabilization. The fault hit features tied to Exchange Online, so organizations hosting on their own servers were largely spared. It is Microsoft's second service disruption this year. "If reliability starts to look like a recurring problem, it hands every IT department a reason to think twice before putting even more of their business in one provider's hands," said eToro's Josh Gilbert.