Microsoft says Microsoft 365 recovery is underway after two-day global outage

Microsoft said Friday it is recovering from a global outage that has disrupted its Microsoft 365 services for a second day, with email queues "significantly reduced and approaching normal levels" across affected infrastructure.

The outage hit a wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and the AI assistant Copilot, cutting off email and workplace platforms for people, institutions and businesses across the world. The company first flagged technical issues just before 1 p.m. Eastern time Thursday, according to its status posts.

Microsoft said it saw broader improvements in North America and "sustained improvements across much of Europe," along with "encouraging recovery signals" in the Asia-Pacific region.

"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 began reporting that their emails had been restored.

What caused the outage?

Microsoft has found no indication of malicious activity, the company said. Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had described the disruption as similar to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows and grounded flights while disrupting hospitals, banks and retailers.

"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.

Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft's top executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator about the disruption.

The recovery did not come quickly. Microsoft engineers struggled to bring systems online early in the incident. "Our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief," the company wrote in one of a series of 22 posts on X. By Friday morning, the company reported signs of stabilization, but warned that users may face "intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure."

How many people were affected?

The total number of affected users is not clear. Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions, a figure that frames the potential scale of the disruption. The outage reached far beyond office email:

• In Britain, a criminal trial in Manchester was halted when Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home. He said the delays illustrated the danger of the court's reliance on technology.
• British police forces said they could not receive crime reports online and urged people to phone in urgent requests.
• The National Pharmacy Association warned that people could face delays getting prescriptions because the outage affected the email systems of the state-run National Health Service.
• Workhorse Group Inc., a U.S.-based industrial technology company, delayed a quarterly earnings call.
• OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools.

The British government said it is "working closely" with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services, but said "robust contingency plans" are in place to minimize disruption.

How did governments across Europe and Asia respond?

In Norway, the government said the outage affected several ministries and that it had received no indication of when the problem would be resolved.

Greece's Minister of Digital Governance Dimitrios Papastergiou said government ministries using Outlook, Teams and Copilot were affected, though not to the degree that would significantly hamper their work. He told private Skai television that the outage underscores how countries should develop technological alternatives for services considered crucial to the smooth operation of government.

In Germany, Florian Druckenthaner, a spokesperson for the 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 the federal government does not use Microsoft in the cloud, and that the federal administration uses an email client that remained stable.

Regardless of the cause, Druckenthaner said, the incident shows "the significance of building up redundancies and alternatives – we are working on that."

In Asia, disruptions reached airlines, banks and government agencies:

• 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 secured alternative communication tools such as telephones.
• Hong Kong businessperson Danny Lau, who runs an aluminum firm, said his company could not 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 also saw operations disrupted.

Air India and IndiGo said their flight operations were unaffected. IndiGo reported that email support services were disrupted, affecting its ability to receive customer queries. Air India said in a statement that it temporarily rerouted its email services so customer queries could get through without interruption.

Why does the outage matter for AI and cloud concentration?

The failures at OpenAI and Anthropic underscore the ripple effects as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies' software. When Copilot and Microsoft 365 authentication go down, AI tools built on those connections follow.

The wider disruption highlights how reliance on a single company and its suite of services can be crippling during an outage, experts and officials said.

"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," Singer said.

The outage lands amid an existing push in Western Europe, where governments and institutions have been trying to reduce their reliance on services provided by a few big U.S. tech companies under the banner of "digital sovereignty." The British court shutdown, the NHS prescription delays and the grounded ministry email systems in Norway, Greece and Japan all supply fresh evidence for that argument.

Microsoft said some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues. The company has not yet said what specific update went awry, leaving the precise technical failure — and any accountability for it — to be established as the incident review proceeds.