Microsoft has said it is seeing "encouraging recovery progress" in restoring its downed 365 platforms, with service availability and email delivery getting back to normal across most affected infrastructure and regions on Friday.
The company has been scrambling to fix a global outage issue involving its servers that took down many of its key Microsoft 365 services such as Outlook and Teams as well as its AI assistant Copilot on Thursday.
It was only on Friday that Microsoft began making significant progress in resolving the issue, with many users reporting they are now able to check their emails again later in the day.
"We're seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements now observed in North America and sustained improvements across much of Europe," said Microsoft on Friday afternoon.
"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."
View the post on X
— https://x.com/i/status/2121213845490336163
For now, Microsoft engineers are focused on stabilising the recovered infrastructure, finalising fixes for the remaining impacted areas, reducing delayed email queues and backlogs and keeping a close eye on the affected services.
"We're closely monitoring service consistency and validating recovery across different connection methods as we work toward full mitigation."
Microsoft has faced several issues addressing the problem. Servers it brought back overnight crashed again once traffic returned, and the company admitted its changes were "not taking as expected".
By Friday morning, it reported "only marginal success", with results improving as Friday afternoon progressed.
Microsoft have also said there is no sign of a cyber attack, but it has yet to name a root cause.
Platforms affected by issue
The outage affects multiple Microsoft 365 services that rely on interacting with Exchange Online and email services.
Here's a brief overview of the most critical ones.
Outlook: Users may be unable to access their mailbox using the web or app versions.
Microsoft 365 : Admins may be unable to load some pages while other users maybe be unable to view their recently used files. Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy and Inventory affected.
Education: Features including Assignments, Reading Progress, and Speaker Progress may be impacted.
Copilot: Users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files.
Microsoft Defender: Users may be unable to load or experience delays when using Microsoft Defender portal pages or solution tabs.
Microsoft Teams: Most of the core functionality including joining calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are not impacted. Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including Calendar related failures with scheduling, invites, viewing, and meeting edits. Creation of Live or Virtual events fail. Navigating to App chats, adding new contacts or syncing contacts in settings fail. Standard channels are working fine but users may experience the inability to create or delete private or shared channels.
Microsoft To Do: The app may not load, and users may see operation failures.
Power BI: All users may intermittently be unable to export reports with MIP sensitivity labels to PDF in Power BI.
Microsoft Planner: Users are experiencing Plan and Task operation reliability issues.
What happened?
The company has attributed the issue to "elevated load" on its infrastructure. The disruption dragged on for much of the US workday on Thursday and also affected other company products such as Teams and the AI assistant Copilot.
View the post on X
— https://x.com/i/status/2121079061774491735
The disruption went global within a span of an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, outage tracker Downdetector reported.
A map posted by Downdetector on X showed the outage affected users across the Americas, and parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.
In the United States, around 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT), according to Downdetector.
Outage reports have since declined, with about 37,000 users reporting experiencing issues with Outlook as of 6 pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT).
Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas," but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected "Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region."
Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.
"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company wrote on X.
"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it added.
"We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service."
