Microsoft‘s global meltdown has knocked out many tools the average office worker needs to get through the day: Outlook, Teams, Copilot, its Microsoft 365 suite.
It hasn’t, however, taken away their sense of humour.
Social media is rife with memes and reaction as the company struggles to resurrect its services – the backbone of governments, police forces and countless companies – after more than 12 hours.
More than 430 million people use Microsoft’s suite of online apps – and while the firm has not confirmed how many users have been affected, many of them appear to have turned to social media to pass the time.
‘Outlook not so good’ is the running gag of the day – closely followed by images of the Microsoft 365 logo, the numeral scribbled over to rename it ‘Microsoft 364’.
A GIF of George Costanza, the idle layabout from 90s sitcom Seinfeld, drumming at his desk with pencils was captioned: ‘Everyone in corporate America right now with nothing to do in the office.’
‘Microsoft down in the middle of the work day,’ another post read, accompanied by an animation of Ed Helms in The Office – breaking out a bottle of Jägermeister and a pair of shot glasses.
An image of the This Is Fine dog, who sips his coffee with a maniacal smile on his face as the room burns around him was accompanied by the lament: ‘Microsoft outage on one of my busiest days’.
The global Microsoft outage – and the firm’s panicked attempts to fix it – have become the target of relentless mockery online
‘Outlook not so good’ – riffing on the firm’s email app – is the running joke of the day
Some have decided that the outage – which has affected governments, public services and companies across the globe – isn’t such a bad thing
Elsewhere, an X user shared an image of Clippy – the now-retired Microsoft Word mascot derided for never being of any use – riffing on the same scene.
It was simply captioned: ‘Clippy’s revenge’.
There has also been the inevitable corporate mockery from the bastions of the era before the web. Against the inevitable cat pictures, one user said: ‘Get ready folks – for FAX.’
Encyclopaedia Britannica, the publisher of the now discontinued compendiums of knowledge, said of its books: ‘Unlike Microsoft Outlook, these bad boys never go down.’
Against a GIF of Fred and Barney from the Flintstones, another user said: ‘Looks like we are going back to the stone age.’
Others have questioned why the company appears incapable of diagnosing the problem and equally incapable of explaining it in anything other than technobabble.
Responding to a post in which the firm said it was ‘opening all available pathways to restore service’, communications expert Sharan Kaur said: ‘Does Microsoft not have a comms team? Because who on earth approved this messaging?’
Or, as one X user put it under a photo of a heavily entangled telegraph pole: ‘Microsoft engineers have narrowed down the problem’.
Elsewhere, a picture of a man buried in cables under a server stack was captioned: ‘The person at Microsoft trying to figure out which cord to plug back in to fix Outlook.’
The Microsoft outage began on Thursday night at 6pm GMT and has now rolled into Friday the 13th.
One user suggested Clippy – the long-retired, widely hated and deeply unhelpful Microsoft Word mascot – was getting ‘revenge’
Some have warned people to prepare for a pre-web era again – turning to Encyclopaedia Britannica for information and using fax machines
Microsoft’s iterant updates on the situation, delivered in technobabble, have prompted mockery
Some users have politely suggested that Microsoft takes its time to fix the issue after it dragged on into Friday
With the weekend looming, some have actually told the tech firm: no need to fix it today, actually.
‘Dear Microsoft, No rush. Take your time. Spend time with your family. Prioritize your mental health. Sincerely, every corporate employee’; ‘We’re cool. No need to fix it until 5:00 on Friday’; ‘The only thing Outlook delivered on time today was happy hour.’
But from one user, a warning: ‘It won’t be so fun when suddenly all the emails start downloading at 4.45pm.’
Despite the reams of jokes flooding the web, the Microsoft outage has caused serious headaches for services across the world – and the UK is no exception.
The UK Government has been forced to put contingency plans in place while the NHS – which uses Microsoft’s 365 suite – has been crippled as workers on the 111 helpline are unable to refer patients on.
Rachel Harrison, national secretary of the GMB union, told Sky News: ‘This is creating a massive backlog and has the potential for chaos.’
And the colossal tech crash has once again raised serious questions over why much of the world’s infrastructure is now dependent on a handful of tech firms.
Last month, a power issue at a Google Cloud data centre in London knocked banks including Revolut, HSBC, Barclays and Lloyds offline, delayed remote court hearings and disrupted Royal Mail’s systems.
An Amazon Web Services issue with DNS – effectively its address book of websites – in October 2025 saw banks, social media firms and the video game Fortnite taken offline for 15 hours.
Amidst the memes, there is clear frustration from people unable to do their job more than 14 hours into the outage
And in 2024, a fatally corrupted update pushed out by cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike crashed computers across the world used by airports, banks, broadcasters, retailers and governments.
While Crowdstrike issued a fix for the issue in just over an hour, public services and infrastructure took days to recover because many computers knocked offline had to be restarted manually.
Over a million air passengers had flights cancelled or delayed, Fortune 500 firms took an estimated £4.2billion hit, and it remains the most disruptive global tech outage to date.
Tech industry analyst and journalist Ed Zitron – whose podcast is called, notably, Better Offline – put it simply on X: ‘What the f*** is going at Microsoft?’
He added: ‘It is completely insane that Outlook is still down. They should fire [CEO] Satya Nadella for this. They won’t…but this is beyond inexcusable. How is it all day? Truly bonkers.’
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