Microsoft reports progress as it works to recover email and other services in a global outage

Microsoft said progress is being made in bringing its popular workplace software back online as a global outage enters its second day, disrupting business communications, police emergency calls, court operations and AI tools.

The outage, which affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, left many complaining they couldn’t access their emails.

Microsoft indicated that it was making some headway as it tried to restore services, in fresh updates posted Friday on social media.

“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” the company said in its latest update, as some users started reporting that their emails were restored.

On a separate status page, the company reported “broader improvements” in North America and “sustained improvements across much of Europe,” as well as “encouraging recovery signals” in the Asia-Pacific region.

Some users could still have “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said.

The total number of people affected is not clear, but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem, which it flagged 18 hours earlier on Thursday, and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”

The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”

A series of 20 posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.

One post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution, saying the changes were “not taking as expected,” the company wrote.

By Friday morning, Microsoft reported “early stabilisation and capacity improvements” and “incremental improvement in several workloads.”

“We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue,” it said in a subsequent post.

In its latest post, the company said it was focusing on “recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritising email queue and backlog reduction.”

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