Microsoft 365 outage continues into 2nd day, but company cites ‘progress’

Detailed summary

Microsoft’s outage involving services like Outlook and Teams has dragged on for hours and impacted users, companies and some government operations.

Thousands of users across the world may be unable to access their emails for a second day as a Microsoft 365 outage that hit critical services like Outlook, Teams and Copilot continued as the company said it is attempting to find a fix.

The company, however, said they are seeing “continued recovery progress” across the world, especially for users in North America and Europe.

“We’re also seeing encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, although some users may continue to experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said in an update early Friday morning.

Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.

“Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in the remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs,” the company said.

The extent of the outage wasn’t clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.

The company said it sees “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident” and will treat the outage with “urgency.”

Reports of the apparent connectivity issues began spiking shortly after noon Eastern on Thursday.

Microsoft added that the outage isn’t due to an increase in traffic, “but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”

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