Microsoft says it's seeing "continued recovery progress" as it battles major worldwide outage
From Asia to the U.S., a Microsoft outage involving services like Outlook and Teams lingered into a second day on Friday, impacting users, companies and government operations around the world.
The outage affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
Microsoft said the outage was linked to a technical issue, not malicious or cyber activity. In an update posted Friday morning, the company said it had resolved the underlying issue and was working on restoring service to its customers.
The Redmond, Washington-based company also said Friday that it was making "encouraging recovery progress," noting improvements in email delivery. However, users may still experience "intermittent access issues" or "delayed email delivery" as recovery efforts continue, Microsoft said.
The company also reported "broader improvements" in North America and "sustained improvements across much of Europe," as well as "encouraging recovery signals" in the Asia-Pacific region.
"We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners," Microsoft said Friday on X. "We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously."
While Microsoft appeared to be making headway toward a resolution, the company said Friday afternoon that it did not have an "ETA for full recovery yet."
The outage affected Microsoft's suite of business products, as well as those tailored for personal use by individuals, students and families. Users in more than 70 countries and territories experienced disruptions, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks technology outages.
"Microsoft in a Friday the 13th moment as global outage [causes] a very bad day in Redmond," Yorkville Ives and Co. tech analyst Dan Ives said in an X post Friday. "There will be major questions for MSFT in this global outage."
Charles Lamanna, executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, said in a social media post Friday that "technical challenges and failure modes" made the recovery process "more difficult than normal."
"I'm working closely with the engineering team to complete the full post-mortem," Lamanna said in the post. "We will publish the post-mortem shortly covering the step-by-step timeline and our many repair items to avoid similar outages in the future."
Widespread impact
Microsoft first flagged technical issues just before 1 p.m. ET Thursday. The company updated users about its recovery progress through a series of posts on its Microsoft 365 Status X account.
More than 130,000 users reported issues with Microsoft on Thursday, Downdetector's website shows. However, those reports started to wane by Friday morning as Microsoft worked to restore its services.
The outage disrupted email for hours, hampering work activity for some employees.
"It's just challenging sending reports or things that needed to be approved," one woman told CBS News Los Angeles.
However, some took delight in the slowdown, with social media users posting videos celebrating the freedom of not having access to email.
It's unclear how many people were impacted. More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to Microsoft's website.
Companies worldwide report issues
OpenAI and Anthropic each reported problems connecting to Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies' software.
U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call on its quarterly earnings because of the outage.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft's top executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator about the global 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.
Texas-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike blamed a bug in an update that allowed its systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July 2024 that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off the air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company's Outlook accounts couldn't receive updates from its U.S. customers due to the outage. If the situation dragged on further, it could "impact the production timeline," he said.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline company, said it also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.
Singapore's Government Technology Agency said government email services were down and that it is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.
The Philippines' Supreme Court said in a statement on social media that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage had affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government's IT infrastructure and that officials were "keeping a close eye on the developments."
