Microsoft has begun restoring its services following a widespread global outage that disrupted access to Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications across at least 74 countries, affecting businesses, educational institutions, government agencies and airline operations.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, continued into Friday, leaving users unable to access email accounts, send messages and use several workplace applications. The outage also affected third-party services, including AI platforms OpenAI and Anthropic, through their Microsoft 365 connectors.
In an update shared on X, Microsoft’s official Microsoft 365 Status account reported improvements in several regions, including North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, as recovery efforts continued.
The company, however, cautioned that services had not returned to normal for all users. Some customers could still encounter intermittent connectivity problems and delays in receiving emails as engineers worked to stabilise the affected infrastructure.
Microsoft said its immediate priorities included restoring the remaining impacted servers, improving service reliability and clearing delayed email queues and backlogs.
The company attributed the disruption to infrastructure problems involving servers responsible for handling secure connections. An overwhelmed process affected their ability to handle user requests, resulting in connectivity failures across multiple services.
Microsoft has indicated that the incident was not caused by a cyberattack. Instead, the company has been working to restore server capacity and redirect traffic through alternative infrastructure to reduce the impact.
The scale of the disruption was reflected in data from outage-tracking platform Downdetector. Reports of Outlook problems in the United States peaked at 138,058 around 1 pm Eastern Time on Thursday before falling to approximately 34,490 by Thursday evening.
Complaints related to Microsoft 365 also declined, reaching nearly 13,000 by 5:47 pm ET, while 763 users reported problems with Teams during the same period. These figures represent user-submitted outage reports rather than confirmed numbers of affected customers.
The disruption also had consequences beyond individual users, affecting organisations dependent on Microsoft’s cloud-based services. Several airlines, including major Indian carriers, issued passenger advisories as technology-related disruptions affected operations.
