Microsoft has said its popular email and other services were improving but not fully restored more than 24 hours after a mass outage disrupted communications worldwide.
The outage , which began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday and affected users in 74 countries, was caused by overloaded servers that became “unexpectedly available,” the company reported. There was no indication of a cyberattack or malicious activity, the tech giant said on Friday.
“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.
Microsoft reported that “email queues [are] significantly reduced and approaching normal levels”.
The outage affected Microsoft 365 services used by global businesses, institutions and individuals, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, its artificial intelligence (AI) tool. It was one of the longest in Microsoft’s history and the second disruption to its services this year.
While Microsoft has not said how many people were affected by the outage, 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.
Microsoft reported midday GMT that email delivery and 365 services were improving across Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific but acknowledged that some services remained spotty.
As the outage stretched into its second day, users scrambled to navigate the outages, which caused logistical headaches and forced some operations to stall or grind to a halt.
The outage underscored how dependent institutions, businesses and people have become on a handful of tech companies providing services that power governments and global economies.
“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 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.”
Foreign banks and financial institutions in Taiwan were hit especially hard, a trader told the news agency Reuters, as their data is emailed to overseas headquarters through Microsoft’s systems. Fax machines were used in Taipei while European exchange operator Euronext told companies to phone in their trades.
Norway’s parliament and several ministries lost access to email, while 80 to 90 Danish municipalities were reportedly affected. Rail operators in Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada said the outage impacted timetables and emailed tickets, and the UK’s massive National Health Service pivoted to using paper records.
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, did not comment on whether it was affected. The Pentagon was slated to upgrade its Microsoft infrastructure starting in June in a $9.7bn deal that included access to Microsoft 365.
The server failures did not appear to shake Wall Street’s confidence in Microsoft, however, which said it would review the incident along with measures to prevent future disruptions. Microsoft’s stock was mostly flat in US market trading on Friday as the tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell slightly, led by the embattled AI company Nvidia .
