Microsoft reports recovery progress after global Outlook and Teams outage

Microsoft said it was seeing encouraging recovery progress after a global outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services worldwide. The company said service availability and email delivery performance were improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure, though some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue.

Outage timeline and scope

Connectivity problems began shortly before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday, when Microsoft said it was investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing online mailboxes. The company later said it was also investigating problems with its email services, which continued into the afternoon. Microsoft said mitigative actions had successfully restored service health and functionality for Teams after an earlier problem, but email problems continued.

At the height of the outage, approximately 130,000 users from dozens of countries reported problems accessing Outlook, according to data from outage tracker Downdetector. Downdetector also showed an increase in Microsoft 365 problems at about 6 p.m. GMT on Thursday, with nearly 130,000 reports of problems in 74 countries affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. Copilot was also affected.

Company response

Microsoft said it had not detected any malicious activity causing the outage. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, said on X: "We regret that today's outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue." He added: "There is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."

Microsoft said it was making continued recovery progress overall, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements in much of Europe and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific. The company said it was prioritizing efforts to preserve emails delayed during the recovery process and reduce email queues and backlogs, extending the timeout window, whereby delayed emails continue to attempt delivery, to 48 hours to help protect messages.

Wider impact

The outage affected businesses, governments and organizations across the world. The UK's National Health Service said the outage was affecting some of its services but that patients should attend appointments as normal. Several UK police forces urged people not to try to report crimes online and to phone them in instead. Australian police and intelligence services were among those affected. OpenAI said it was investigating a problem with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools were not working as expected. Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

Microsoft said once mitigated, it would provide full details of the root cause, defence-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report. The company has not said when full service will return.

Why it matters

The outage disrupted email, meetings and collaboration tools for millions of users across dozens of countries, affecting hospitals, schools, police forces, airlines, banks and government agencies. It highlighted dependence on a small number of technology providers for critical daily business and government operations.

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Sources

• houstonchronicle.com: Microsoft says Outlook and Teams are recovering after global outage
• abcnews.com: Microsoft Outlook outage updates: 'Progress toward recovery' as email disruption now on 2nd day - ABC News
• cnbc.com: Microsoft outage continues, Outlook and other 365 services down
• theguardian.com: Microsoft scrambles to fix global outage affecting Teams and Outlook | Microsoft | The Guardian
• ibtimes.com.au: Microsoft Teams Down? Global Outage Drags Into Second Day as Millions Lose Outlook, Chats and Meetings
• irishtimes.com: Microsoft sees ‘encouraging recovery progress’ in Europe after global outage – The Irish Times

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.