The Latest: Microsoft says recovery efforts are making progress on worldwide outage

Detailed summary

Microsoft is fixing a massive global outage for its popular workplace software that dragged on into a second day, disrupting everything from emails to police emergency calls and…

Microsoft is fixing a massive global outage for its popular workplace software that dragged on into a second day, disrupting everything from emails to police emergency calls and AI tools.

A wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were affected.

Microsoft first flagged the problem on Thursday. It indicated that it was making some headway as it tried to restore services in fresh updates posted Friday on social media.

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 indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress Friday, saying it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements,” and that there was “incremental improvement in several workloads.”

But problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company’s services and anecdotal reports on social media.

The Microsoft outage means no incessant email chimes or message pings, but still we stayed online

No Microsoft Outlook email chimes, no Teams message pings, no new notifications and, very possibly, no work getting done.

Microsoft 365 teetered on the edge of becoming Microsoft 364 as the global outage stretched from Thursday into, ironically (or fittingly, depending on your personal outlook), Friday the 13th. The disruption has impacted an unknown number of netizens, but the total could be as high as 450 million — the figure the tech giant touts as the number of paid customers of the Microsoft 365 apps.

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