Microsoft said on Friday that its widely used email and other services were improving but had not been fully restored more than 24 hours after a mass outage disrupted communications around the world.
The disruption began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday and affected users in 74 countries. The company blamed overloaded servers that had become “unexpectedly available” and said there was no sign of a cyberattack or other malicious activity.
Microsoft reports gradual progress on email and 365 services
In a statement, the company said it was seeing encouraging recovery, with service availability and email delivery getting better across a growing share of the affected infrastructure. It also said email backlogs had fallen sharply and were nearing normal levels.
Also read: Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot users
By midday GMT, Microsoft said email delivery and its 365 services had improved across Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific region, although some services were still patchy.
The outage hit Microsoft 365 products used by businesses, institutions and individuals, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, the company’s artificial intelligence tool. The company has not said how many people were affected. It is the second disruption to its services this year, and one of the longest in its history.
Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million commercial subscribers to Microsoft 365. The US-based company is valued at more than $3.8 trillion.
Banks, rail and health services hit in several countries
Users struggled to work around the problems as the outage stretched into a second day, causing logistical headaches and forcing some operations to stall or stop altogether.
Foreign banks and financial institutions in Taiwan were hit especially hard, a trader told Reuters, because their data is sent by email to overseas headquarters through Microsoft’s systems. Fax machines were used in Taipei, while the European exchange operator Euronext told companies to phone in their trades.
Norway’s parliament and several ministries lost access to email, and 80 to 90 Danish municipalities were reportedly affected. Rail operators in Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada said the outage disrupted timetables and emailed tickets, and the UK’s National Health Service switched to paper records.
Reuters reported that the US House of Representatives and local governments were also affected. The US Department of Defense, which relies heavily on Microsoft’s services, did not comment on whether it had been affected. The Pentagon was due to start upgrading its Microsoft infrastructure in June under a $9.7bn deal that included access to Microsoft 365.
The episode also highlighted how much institutions, businesses and ordinary people depend on a small number of technology companies. Walter Pasquarelli, a strategy adviser to governments on AI and an affiliated researcher at the University of Cambridge, said “what we do know so far is that this is first and foremost a communication risk.”
Microsoft shares steady as company plans review
The server failures did not appear to dent investor confidence. Microsoft’s stock was mostly flat in US trading on Friday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell slightly, led by Nvidia.
Microsoft said it would review the incident and the measures needed to prevent future disruptions.
