Traders reached for fax machines, Japan's finance ministry pinned paper notices to the wall, and the AI assistants meant to automate the office went dark right along with the inbox.
Hang in there clippy...For more than 18 hours, the AI agents Silicon Valley says will soon do your job couldn't read your email, because nobody could. A Microsoft 365 failure that began Thursday knocked out Outlook for businesses and governments in more than 70 countries and took Microsoft's own Copilot down with it, along with the Microsoft connectors that Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT use to reach users' mail and calendars.
Every one of those failures has one thing in common: Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud email and calendar backend. In its status notice Friday morning, Microsoft said features across its 365 services "that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted," while "elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional." Teams calls and group chats mostly kept working. Anything that had to
