Microsoft gradually restores services after major global outage

Detailed summary

Microsoft said it had made ‘additional progress toward service recovery’ with improvements being made to email access.

Microsoft has said services are being “gradually restored” after a major global outage that saw police forces, the NHS, businesses and schools among those impacted amid one of the worst IT failures for years.

The UK Government and its counterparts worldwide have been forced to put in place contingency measures due to the outage, which has seen Microsoft scramble to restore email, Teams and other services since they went down yesterday around 6pm.

In its latest update, Microsoft said services were “being gradually restored”, with users seeing some email services beginning to come back.

The tech giant said while improvements were being made to email access, “some users may continue to experience intermittent issues”.

It stressed it was working with “urgency” to find a full fix for the issue, which has caused widespread disruption since late Thursday.

On its Microsoft 365 status page, the firm said: “Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing.

“Reducing email queues and backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.”

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak last night.

Millions of its customers have been unable to send and receive emails through Outlook, with Teams has also been affected for many, and the tech giant’s Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services are also disrupted.

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