Microsoft reports progress in restoring global 365 services outage

Microsoft services return online as two-day global outage enters recovery

Microsoft services that went down amid a widespread outage are gradually coming back online as the disruption enters a second day. An issue that impacted Microsoft 365 on Thursday afternoon took out services such as Outlook, Teams, and Copilot 365, disrupting businesses, health care providers, schools, governmental bodies, and organizations around the world. While some apps and features are still running in a degraded state and some users may experience intermittent connectivity issues or delayed email deliveries, access to emails has been restored for many users.

The company toiled overnight to restore service. Around 10 pm ET on Thursday, Microsoft said some attempts to improve serviceability did not work as hoped. By 2:45 am the following morning, though, the company was seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of its latest traffic optimization actions. Around 8:30 am, Microsoft reported continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific. Senior Verge correspondent Tom Warren reports that according to his sources, the outage is linked to Azure VNet config changes.

Charles Lamanna, Copilot, agents, and platform leader at Microsoft, stated in a statement to The Verge:

We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure. We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward.

Charles Lamanna, Copilot, agents, and platform leader, via The Verge

In a statement reported by Sky News tech correspondent Rowland Manthorpe, Microsoft described the outage as a technical issue, and stated that it is not related to cyber, AI/agents, DDOS, or malicious activity. Microsoft has promised that once it has fully resolved the situation, it will release a post-incident report detailing the root cause.

Global Spread and Impacts

The outage drew nearly 130,000 complaints about Outlook in the US alone at its peak, with health care providers, schools, the House of Representatives, and court systems among those affected. In Singapore, the government email system stopped working, and the Supreme Court of the Philippines reported disruptions to the processing of electronic submissions. IndiGo reported that its email support services were impacted and that it might not be able to receive customer emails, though its other support channels remained available. Akasa Air also reported delays to email support and directed passengers needing immediate assistance to its 24/7 care centre or social-media channels, while Air India confirmed its flight operations and communication channels were unaffected after temporarily rerouting its emails.

The disruption cascaded through daily operations in nearly every sector, halting court trials, delaying medical prescriptions, and forcing municipalities from Baltimore County to Austin, Texas, to report communications hurdles. In Britain, Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home and halted a trial in Manchester, stating that the delay illustrated the danger of courts relying so heavily on technology. British police forces were unable to receive crime reports online and urged citizens to phone in urgent requests, while the National Health Service warned patients of prescription delays as email systems faltered. The UK's National Pharmacy Association stated the email issues could cause delays to some prescriptions. In Japan, where the majority of businesses and institutions are said to use Microsoft services, some companies seemingly went back to using fax machines on a temporary basis. In Norway, the government reported that several ministries were affected, and Greece's Minister of Digital Governance Dimitrios Papastergiou confirmed that government ministries using Outlook, Teams, and Copilot were disrupted, though not enough to completely halt their work.

Corporate supply chains and financial operations also absorbed heavy blows. Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau warned that if the situation dragged on, his aluminum firm could face production timeline delays because it could not receive updates from U.S. customers through Outlook. Swiss luxury goods giant Richemont slightly delayed its earnings release on Friday, and electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled its third-quarter earnings call to November 16. Artificial intelligence developers OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, revealing deeper dependencies in the software ecosystem. Meanwhile, Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke told reporters in Sydney that Microsoft had likened the disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which was triggered by a faulty software update.

Given that the outage prevented them from doing their jobs properly, some workers in Australia and the UK used it as an excuse to clock off early on Friday. However, the inevitable return to normality weighed on some people's minds. I thought it was heaven because I wasn't getting any emails at all, but this is just a Microsoft outage, so I'm actually just waiting in line at the gates of hell, the Japan Times quoted one person as saying.

Infrastructure Vulnerability and Single-Vendor Dependence

The root cause traced back to problems involving Microsoft's Exchange Online infrastructure, where a portion of servers became inoperable. Microsoft stated that the strain on its systems was not caused by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable after failing automatic health checks and shutting down, which placed an increased load on the remaining infrastructure. Restarting the equipment and redistributing traffic did not immediately produce the expected result.

While engineering teams deployed software fixes, redirected traffic, and prepared automated recovery systems to restart unresponsive servers, the incident prompted immediate warnings from experts and officials about the modern economy's fragility. James Owen, managing partner of Digital Risks at consultancy Control Risks, noted by phone that the outage highlights a business resilience and dependency issue decades in the making. Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow's School of Computing Science, observed that office workers felt like they were having a virtual snow day, adding that the problem serves to emphasize the digital infrastructure dependence built around a single company. Florian Druckenthaner, a spokesperson for Germany's digitization ministry, stated that the incident shows the significance of building up redundancies and alternatives, pointing out that the German federal government does not use Microsoft in the cloud and uses a stable independent email client.

For readers trying to determine whether their systems are operational or what steps to take next, Microsoft and affected institutions advise checking official status dashboards. Affected users should use alternative communication tools such as telephones for urgent matters, as British police and Japanese authorities have done, and monitor corporate IT channels to confirm when Exchange Online queues fully clear. Businesses and customers experiencing halted communications can also check if their providers have temporarily rerouted email addresses, as Air India successfully did to keep customer queries flowing without interruption.