A massive global outage impacting more than a dozen Microsoft cloud services, including Outlook email and Teams messaging stretched into Friday as the tech giant struggled to restore the service, which is critical to the day-to-day functions of governments, schools and businesses around the world.

Starting around 12:50 p.m. ET Thursday, Microsoft began warning users of its products on social media that it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online,” its cloud email service.

Microsoft says 'incremental improvement' beginning to show

"global telemetry and customer reports show incremental improvement in several workloads; however, service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline."

This shortly after, "Microsoft offers buyouts to around 60,000 employees to contain costs."

It's possible it is also affecting Microsoft Office 365 business users of the cloud version.

Man, what a mess. We provided software and services for business for many years. if the software didn't work in the morning we were in trouble.