Microsoft 365 services partially restored after global outage

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: News websites
Today 16:10

Microsoft reports progress in restoring Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services after an outage affected users in at least 74 countries and territories.

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This April 12, 2016, file photo shows the Microsoft logo in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

Microsoft is gradually restoring its 365 services following a major outage that disrupted access to Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other platforms across dozens of countries.

The company said on Friday that recovery efforts were progressing across several regions, with Europe showing encouraging signs of improvement. Japan's services remained comparatively stable, while North America was also experiencing improvements.

However, Microsoft warned that some users could continue to encounter disruptions as restoration efforts proceed. The company also said its extended email delivery window, which allows messages to take up to 48 hours to arrive, remains in place to prevent delayed emails from failing delivery as the system works through the accumulated backlog.

The disruption began on November 12, when users reported difficulties accessing several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Copilot and Teams.

How the outage unfolded

Microsoft first told users around 17:50 GMT Thursday that it was investigating reports of trouble reaching Exchange Online, its cloud email service. At about 19:50 GMT, it said it was testing a configuration change to its cloud servers, and by 21:40 GMT it was restarting affected servers to return them to service.

The company then said a core process on the affected servers was becoming overwhelmed and causing a loss of capacity, so it was shifting traffic to relieve the servers still running. Servers brought back online could stop responding again once traffic reached them, it added, and engineers were analyzing diagnostic data to find the trigger.

At 04:36 GMT Friday, Microsoft reported partial recovery in regions where it had applied adjustments, though not yet sustained recovery.

Around 07:30 GMT, it said server stability was improving after a patch to an upstream authentication and routing configuration component was applied to part of its infrastructure.

According to outage monitoring platform Downdetector, the incident affected users in at least 74 countries and territories. A Microsoft spokesperson said the outage was not caused by a cyberattack.