Microsoft said Friday morning that it has been “seeing encouraging recovery progress” in restoring its widely used 365 services, including its Outlook email product and workplace software, amid a global outage.
The outage, which impacted Microsoft 365 products such as Teams, Copilot, and Outlook email, left businesses, government offices, private individuals, and organizations unable to communicate through the platform.
Microsoft has been providing updates on its progress through posts on X and elsewhere. On Friday morning, the company said it is “continuing to see improvements in service availability, with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.”
“Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues,” the Redmond, Washington-based company wrote.
“We’ve implemented additional mitigation measures, are restoring remaining affected infrastructure, and are investigating residual service issues while closely monitoring service health and validating recovery across affected connection methods.”
Around 45 minutes later, at around 10:40 a.m. ET, the company said, “We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.”
Previously, the company said it had seen no evidence that the outage was caused by malicious activity. Before it indicated progress on Friday morning, Microsoft posted several X posts on Thursday saying it was struggling to get the situation fully under control.
“We’re observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren’t resulting in sustained recovery,” the company said late on Thursday night.
The tech giant first flagged technical issues just before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.
As of Friday morning, users were still reporting that Outlook was down on DownDetector, a website that tracks website and service disruptions. A graph provided by DownDetector showed that the peak of users reporting Outlook was down occurred around 1:16 p.m. ET on Thursday.
“Outlook and email are mainly affected, with knock-on problems in Teams, Copilot, and other apps,” the site said in an alert.
Outlook and Teams are two of the most widely used workplace applications with hundreds of millions of users. The outage prevented people from performing essential functions such as sending emails, managing calendars, and hosting virtual meetings.
It affected government agencies from Australia to Japan and the United States, delayed trading firms, kept some companies from publishing earnings, and prompted airlines to warn customers of communication lags, according to public statements. Organizations that host Microsoft services on their own servers, rather than in the cloud, were somewhat spared.
A spokesperson for the UK government said it was working with Microsoft to find a solution for the outage that hit organizations such as the National Health Service (NHS) and London’s Metropolitan Police. NHS said its local services were turning to alternate measures such as using IT systems or paper records.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. That outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers.
Microsoft does not “believe they are dealing with a cyberattack,” Burke told reporters in Sydney on Friday. “They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry.”
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
