Microsoft Services Still Recovering More Than a Day After Widespread Global Outage

Microsoft said on Friday that its email and other widely used services were improving but had not been fully restored, more than 24 hours after a mass outage disrupted communications for users around the world.

The outage began at around 16:00 GMT on Thursday and affected users in 74 countries. The company said the failure was caused by overloaded servers that became "unexpectedly available," and added that there was no indication of a cyberattack or other malicious activity.

"We're seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure," the company said in a statement, adding that "email queues [are] significantly reduced and approaching normal levels."

The disruption hit Microsoft 365 services used by businesses, institutions and individuals globally, including the Outlook email platform, the Teams collaboration tool and Copilot, the company's artificial intelligence assistant. It was one of the longest outages in Microsoft's history and the second disruption to its services this year.

Microsoft has not said how many people were affected, but the company announced in January that it had more than 450 million Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers. The United States-based tech giant is valued at more than $3.8 trillion.

Reporting at midday GMT on Friday, Microsoft said email delivery and 365 services were improving across Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific region, though it acknowledged that some services remained spotty. As the outage stretched into a second day, users scrambled to work around the failures, which caused logistical headaches and forced some operations to stall or grind to a halt.

The outage highlighted how dependent institutions, businesses and individuals have become on a small number of tech companies whose services underpin governments and the global economy. "What we do know so far is that this is first and foremost a communication risk," said Walter Pasquarelli, a strategy adviser to governments on AI and an affiliated researcher at the University of Cambridge. "It's not just workers across businesses who cannot get access to it, but there's lots of government services and lots of government infrastructure that actually relies on that."

The fallout was felt across continents. Foreign banks and financial institutions in Taiwan were hit especially hard, a trader told the Reuters news agency, because their data is emailed to overseas headquarters through Microsoft's systems. Fax machines were pressed back into service in Taipei, while European exchange operator Euronext told companies to phone in their trades. Norway's parliament and several ministries lost access to email, 80 to 90 Danish municipalities were reportedly affected, and rail operators in Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada said the outage disrupted timetables and emailed tickets. Britain's National Health Service switched to paper records, and in the United States the House of Representatives and local governments were affected, Reuters reported.

The US Department of Defense, which relies heavily on Microsoft's services, declined to comment on whether it was affected. The Pentagon was scheduled to begin upgrading its Microsoft infrastructure in June under a $9.7bn deal that includes access to Microsoft 365.

The server failures did not appear to dent Wall Street's confidence in the company. Microsoft's stock was mostly flat in US trading on Friday even as the tech-heavy Nasdaq index slipped slightly, dragged down by the embattled AI company Nvidia. Microsoft said it would review the incident along with measures to prevent future disruptions.