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, with fixes not working 'as expected'.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft's suite of online apps and, while the firm has not confirmed how many users are 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.

On Instagram, one woman filmed herself grabbing a bottle of wine as she sarcastically quipped, 'Oh no, I'm devastated,' while entertainment venue Stack Newcastle wrote: 'Thanks Microsoft, the weekend starts now.'

Riffing on the post-credits tagline that teases fans of Marvel superhero films, one jokester wrote: 'Microsoft Outlook will return in AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY.'

For some, there is genuine frustration. An image of the This Is Fine dog, an anthropomorphised cartoon puppy sipping coffee as the room burns around him, was accompanied by the lament: 'Microsoft outage on one of my busiest days'. 

Elsewhere, an X user shared an image of Clippy – the now-retired Microsoft Word mascot derided for never being of any use – in the same scene.

It was simply captioned: 'Clippy's revenge.'

There has also been the inevitable corporate mockery, including from the bastions of the pre-web era, Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The publisher of the now discontinued compendiums said of its books: 'Unlike Microsoft Outlook, these bad boys never go down.' 

Burger King wrote: 'Whoever's troubleshooting and working on the outage rn [right now]... take your time. Go out and get a Whopper.' 

'Emails can wait. Consider this your cue to plan that getaway,' said Air India, posting a wink emoji. 

Elsewhere, there were jokes about the fallback measures people were resorting to without Microsoft software.

'Get ready folks – for FAX,' opined one poster. Against a GIF of Fred and Barney from the Flintstones, another said: 'Looks like we are going back to the stone age.'

Professor Azeem Majeed, of Imperial College London, said he was getting on with business by swapping Microsoft Teams meetings for old-fashioned phone calls. 

'I am telling my students and my team, this is how we worked in the 1990s,' he said.

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 man buried in cables under a server stack was labelled '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. 

With the weekend looming, some have actually told the tech firm: no need to fix it today, actually.

Among the pleas: '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 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.

And in 2024, a fatally corrupted update pushed out by cyber-security 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. 

More than a million air passengers had flights cancelled or delayed, Fortune 500 firms took an estimated £4.2billion hit, and it was, until today, the most disruptive global tech outage to date.

Microsoft has not yet revealed the cause of the outage but it is not thought that a malicious attack or a rogue agentic AI is to blame.

Firms including ChatGPT's creator OpenAI have admitted that their artificial intelligence agents have previously broken into websites such as the AI repository Hugging Face and those belonging to the Australian government.

But as the outage threatens to stretch into a second day, frustration is beginning to show.

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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