Microsoft reports gradual restoration of Outlook, Teams and other services after global outage

Microsoft announced that its Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services are gradually recovering after a widespread outage that began on Thursday afternoon and impacted users in 74 countries. The company said the disruption was caused by overloaded servers that became “unexpectedly available” and found no evidence of a cyberattack.

“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.

Email queues have been “significantly reduced and approaching normal levels,” Microsoft added, noting that service performance was improving across Europe, North America and the Asia-Pacific region, though some functions remained spotty.

The outage, one of the longest in the firm’s history and the second major disruption this year, affected Microsoft 365’s 450 million commercial subscribers, including businesses, government agencies and individual users. Institutions such as Norway’s parliament, Danish municipalities, rail operators in Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada, and the U.K. National Health Service reported operational difficulties. In the United States, the House of Representatives and various local governments experienced interruptions, according to Reuters.

Walter Pasquarelli, a strategy adviser to governments on AI at the University of Cambridge, described the incident as a “communication risk,” emphasizing the reliance of public services on a small number of technology providers. Foreign banks in Taiwan faced particular challenges, with traders resorting to fax machines and European exchange operator Euronext urging companies to place trades by phone.

The U.S. Department of Defense did not comment on any impact, even as it prepares a $9.7 billion upgrade of its Microsoft infrastructure scheduled for June.