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Microsoft said Friday it was seeing early signs of recovery from a global outage that disrupted Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams and other services for more than 12 hours, affecting businesses and governments across dozens of countries.
"Recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure. We are seeing early signs of stabilization, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced," the company said on its service health page.
"We’re seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure," Microsoft said in a 07:30 a.m. GMT update, adding it was expanding the fix to servers supporting active regions.
Earlier attempts struggled.
"We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected," the company wrote on X around 0300 GMT. It later reported "marginal success" after applying patches and rebooting infrastructure.
Microsoft has said it is "not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident" and will publish a post-incident report on the root cause.
It extended the timeout for delayed emails to 48 hours to preserve them.
The company said Thursday evening that "elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable," straining remaining infrastructure. The problem was traced to Exchange Online-powered applications. Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft likened the outage to the 2024 CrowdStrike incident, "where there is an update that has gone awry."
The disruption spread to 74 countries and territories within an hour, according to Downdetector, which recorded about 130,000 reports for Outlook at the peak.
In the U.S., reports exceeded 97,000 for Outlook, 38,000 for Microsoft 365 and 4,500 for Teams. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, the company says.
Japan’s finance ministry and Cabinet Office asked people with urgent matters to call, warning that emails "may not have been received correctly." Singapore’s government emails were down, and the Philippines’ Supreme Court said some operations were affected. New Zealand halted visa processing.
In Britain, the GMB union said the outage was having a "serious impact" on ambulance and NHS trusts, creating a "massive backlog" for 111 services, though 999 lines were unaffected.
Indian airlines Air India and IndiGo reported email disruptions but no impact on flights. Workhorse Group delayed its earnings call, and AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools.
"It really does emphasise the degree of our dependency on critical technologies," Joseph Jarnecki of the Royal United Services Institute told Sky News, warning that relying on a single provider for critical services is a risk.
Microsoft shares fell about 3% in early trading, as the Microsoft outage recovery continued.
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