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Microsoft users across 74 countries continued to face widespread service disruptions Friday as an outage affecting Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other platforms passed the 12-hour mark, with the company saying recovery efforts were not progressing as expected.
Microsoft said part of its infrastructure across multiple regions was experiencing elevated load after some servers unexpectedly became unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining systems.
The company said the problem was not caused by unusually high user traffic.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft 365 Status said on the U.S. social media platform X.
Microsoft said it was exploring alternative measures to increase capacity and restore services.
To limit the impact, Microsoft halted deployment operations, redirected additional traffic away from affected infrastructure, and began restarting servers to restore service.
The company said it was also testing a configuration change designed to address a problem that caused servers to fail automatic health checks and go offline.
Microsoft later validated an alternative health-check method that allowed some affected servers to return to service and began applying the change more widely.
The company reported limited recovery as traffic was routed away from affected servers but said the broader restoration process remained incomplete.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft said.
The first reports emerged at 11:17 a.m. ET Thursday. Downdetector recorded more than 97,000 reports involving Outlook in the U.S., more than 38,000 for Microsoft 365 and about 4,500 for Teams.
The disruption spread across 74 countries and territories, including Asian countries. Problems were also reported across the Americas, Europe and Africa.
Users experienced difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes as well as Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services.
New Zealand’s Foreign Ministry said the outage affected its ability to receive emails, including at its embassies, consulates and representative offices worldwide.
The disruption also affected major platforms integrated with Microsoft services.
OpenAI said some of its tools were unavailable because of the outage, while Anthropic reported problems with features connected to Microsoft 365.
Microsoft said changes introduced to improve service availability had not produced the expected results and did not provide a clear timeline for full recovery.
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