Microsoft outage was largest of 2026, report says

As Microsoft continues to try to fix a huge service outage that has disrupted software services globally, a new report dropped, possibly confirming something most of us could have guessed.

Ookla and DownDetector published a report on Friday afternoon claiming that the Microsoft outage was, by a significant margin, the largest such outage of 2026, based on the number of users who reported problems on DownDetector. Going by that metric, Microsoft's outage was reported 7.4 million times, compared to just 2.8 million reports for a YouTube outage in February that ranked second among all outages in 2026.

During the Microsoft outage, DownDetector said that it received a peak of 19,650 user error reports for Microsoft's services per minute, which is more than 1,500 times the normal level. Nearly 24 hours later, users are still reporting errors for Microsoft

Aside from the sheer number of reports, the length of the outage was also noteworthy. Outlook and other Microsoft enterprise software services were out for more than 24 hours, compared to a recent 11-hour outage in August, as Mashable reported at the time.

There is one major caveat to all of this: DownDetector relies on user reports rather than anything more verifiable. This has caused companies to sometimes dispute the site's data, which is exactly what Amazon Web Services did (rather passively aggressively) after DownDetector incorrectly showed that AWS was experiencing problems at the same time that Outlook was on Thursday. Mashable reached out to Microsoft, but the company declined to comment on the Ookla report.

As of late Friday afternoon, Microsoft's outage appears to be subsiding, though the company has yet to publish an ETA for full recovery.

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