Microsoft 365 went down for several days starting on November 12, knocking out Outlook, Teams, and Copilot for users in over 70 countries, including governments, courts, healthcare services, businesses, airlines, and banks.
Microsoft has fixed things now, but this was one of the most widespread outages ever.
Past major outages underscore tech dependence
This isn't the first time a tech glitch caused chaos. In 2024, a CrowdStrike bug crashed millions of Windows devices worldwide.
Back in 2021, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went dark at once due to a configuration error, impacting users worldwide for nearly six hours.
Even Amazon Web Services had a huge outage in 2025 that disrupted tons of apps globally.
All these incidents show just how much our daily lives depend on tech working smoothly, and how big the ripple effects can be when it doesn't.