Microsoft said progress is being made in bringing its popular workplace software back online as a global outage enters its second day, disrupting business communications, police crime reporting, court operations, AI tools and many other services.
The outage, which affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, left people, institutions and businesses across the world without access to email and other platforms.
Microsoft said it was making headway as it tried to restore services Friday.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” the company said, as some users started reporting that their emails were restored.
The company reported “broader improvements” in North America and “sustained improvements across much of Europe,” as well as “encouraging recovery signals” in the Asia-Pacific region.
Users may have “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said.
The total number of people affected is not clear, but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
Microsoft scrambles to recover services
In its latest status update, Microsoft reported that it was continuing to see improvements in service with “email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels.”
The Redmond, Washington, company first flagged technical issues just before 1 p.m. Eastern time Thursday.
So far, there is no indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity, the company said.
Microsoft engineers struggled to bring systems online early. “Our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” the company wrote as part of a series of 22 posts on X.
By Friday morning there were signs that the situation was stabilizing.
“Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues,” it said in its latest post.
Europe woke up to disruptions
In Britain, the outage brought a halt to a trial in Manchester. Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home because of delays that he said illustrated the danger of the court’s reliance on technology.
The British government said it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services but that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption.
British police forces said they’re unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to phone in urgent requests.
The National Pharmacy Association said people could face delays getting their prescriptions because the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Service.
In Norway, the government said the outage affected several ministries and had not received any indication about when the problem would be resolved.
Greece’s Minister of Digital Governance Dimitrios Papastergiou said government ministries using Outlook, Teams and Copilot were affected but not to the degree that would significantly hamper their work.
Asian businesses and governments were affected
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. That outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers.
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the disruption.
“They (Microsoft) don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told reporters in Sydney.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company couldn’t receive updates from its U.S. customers through Outlook. If the situation dragged on further, this could “impact the production timeline,” he said. Some banks in Hong Kong, an Asian financial hub, also saw some operations disrupted.
Air India and IndiGo said their flight operations were unaffected. IndiGo reported email support services were disrupted, affecting its ability to receive customer queries.
Air India temporarily rerouted its email services so customer queries could get through without interruption, the company said in a statement.
The Singapore government said emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue. The Philippines’ Supreme Court said some operations were affected, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the government’s IT infrastructure was affected and that officials were “keeping a close eye on the developments.” Japanese authorities had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools such as telephones, the government said.
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a quarterly earnings call.
OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software.
The widespread disruptions highlight dependence on a single tech company
The widespread impact highlights how reliance on one company and its suite of services can be crippling during such an outage, experts and officials said.
Papastergiou in Greece said government ministries using Outlook, Teams and Copilot were affected.
He told private Skai television that underscores how countries should develop technological alternatives for services considered crucial for the smooth operation of government.
Florian Druckenthaner, a spokesperson for Germany’s digitization ministry, said the government’s IT security agency believes German business was widely affected, but there were no reports of major disruption at government level.
He said that the federal government doesn’t use Microsoft in the cloud, and that the federal administration also uses an email client that was stable.
Regardless of the cause, Druckenthaner said, the incident shows “the significance of building up redundancies and alternatives – we are working on that.”
“With no emails coming or going, many office workers feel like they are having a virtual snow day,” said Jeremy Singer, a professor at the University of Glasgow’s School of Computing Science.
“This problem serves to emphasize the dependence we have built on one company’s digital infrastructure, and may lead us to question whether we need more resilience in our IT ecosystem.”
Governments and institutions in Western Europe have been trying to reduce their reliance on services provided by a few big U.S. tech services in their continuing push for “digital sovereignty.”
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AP journalists Adam Schreck in Bangkok, Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi, Mayuko Ono in Tokyo, Geir Moulson in Berlin, Menalaos Hadjicostis in Nicosia, and Pan Pylas and Brian Melley in London contributed.
