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Microsoft 365 outage continues: Partial improvements, delayed emails and governments still affected

After more than 18–20 hours, the company reported gradual progress in the recovery and stated that it is seeing a "broad recovery and stability" in its services, although it cautioned that service has not yet been fully restored for all customers and regions and that "it will take time." It ruled out the possibility of a cyberattack.

Microsoft 365 outage continues: Partial improvements, delayed emails and governments still affected

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Carlos Dominguez
Published by
Carlos Dominguez

Published / Updated

3 minutes read

Millions of users worldwide reported problems on Thursday accessing Outlook, Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 services. The outage, which Microsoft attributed to a "high load" on part of its infrastructure, spread to at least 74 countries and affected governments and large companies.

Japan noted a "major impact," Australia estimated losses in the billions of dollars, and in the United Kingdom, organizations such as the NHS and the police were affected. On Friday, the outage continued with partial improvements, although some users are still experiencing intermittent issues and delays in email delivery.

The outage began with difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas and spread to Microsoft 365 connectivity "for users in any region." Users reported errors when sending and receiving emails, loading inboxes, and connecting to Teams, Copilot, OneDrive, and Azure.

What Microsoft said

The company explained that several servers were "unexpectedly unavailable," which overloaded the remaining infrastructure. In a more recent statement, published this Friday on X, Microsoft formally apologized: "We deeply regret the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners."

The company confirmed that this is a technical issue unrelated to cyberattacks, artificial intelligence or bots. The cause was a failure during a prior network capacity upgrade that manifested following a recent network change.

"We have addressed the underlying issue and are continuing to restore service to the remaining customers and regions," the company stated.

Due to the scale of the demand, they restored services gradually, verifying stability at each stage. They also extended the timeout for emails to 48 hours and announced that it will publish a full post-incident report once the review is complete. The company has yet to provide an estimated time for full restoration.

Impact on users and businesses

Downdetector recorded tens of thousands of outage reports for Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, and Azure on Thursday afternoon. By 2:07 p.m. ET, the platform had recorded more than 97,000 reports about Outlook, more than 38,000 about Microsoft 365, and about 4,500 about Teams. The peak exceeded 130,000 reports for Outlook; on Friday, the number of reports decreased, but remains high in several regions.

Microsoft had previously reported that the issues with Teams in North America had been resolved, although some users continued to report connection difficulties. Some organizations resorted to faxes or alternative systems while waiting for service to return to normal.

What users should do

Microsoft recommended that IT administrators check the Microsoft 365 admin center, under the Service Status section, to check the incident EX1550543 and MO1550821 and receive real-time updates. The company also noted that no configuration changes were necessary on users' devices or tenant accounts.

The company did not specify when service will be fully restored, but stated that it is "aggressively pursuing all avenues to mitigate the impact." Users can follow updates on the incident on Microsoft's official status page and on the @MSFT365Status on X.

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