Microsoft is continuing efforts to restore its Microsoft 365 services after a global outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other platforms, with some systems showing signs of improvement but service capacity yet to return to normal.
The disruption, which began on Thursday, affected services connected to Microsoft's Exchange Online and email infrastructure, leaving users in several countries unable to access their mailboxes, send or receive emails, view recently used files and access some other Microsoft 365 features.
Microsoft's affected services included Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft To Do and several administrative, security and education features.
In its latest update on Friday, Microsoft reported incremental improvements across several affected services. However, it said service health remained variable and system capacity had not fully returned to normal levels.
"Recovery actions are ongoing and have progressed in phases across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure," the company said, adding that it was monitoring system performance and customer reports as it continued its recovery efforts.
Microsoft also said it was prioritizing email queues and backlog processing to protect delayed messages. As part of the recovery measures, it extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to help preserve emails delayed by the disruption.
Earlier, the company reported that a large number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, shifting workloads onto the remaining infrastructure. Microsoft said it was working to restore affected servers, improve traffic management and apply technical changes to stabilize its systems.
Although some recovery measures initially showed positive results, Microsoft acknowledged that its earlier adjustments had not consistently restored services. The company said it had no indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity.
The disruption was reported across dozens of countries, with outage-monitoring platform Downdetector recording roughly 130,000 reports of problems accessing Outlook on Thursday. The number of reports subsequently declined.
The outage also affected businesses and government operations in several countries. Singapore's Government Technology Agency reported problems with government email services, while the Philippines' Supreme Court said the disruption had affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, the government's IT infrastructure was also affected, prompting authorities to arrange alternative communication methods. Some businesses and banking operations in Hong Kong reported disruptions.
Technology companies OpenAI and Anthropic also reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools. Meanwhile, Indian airlines IndiGo and Air India experienced disruptions to their email support services, although both companies said their flight operations remained unaffected.
Microsoft says more than 430 million people use its Microsoft 365 applications. The ongoing disruption has highlighted the widespread reliance of businesses, government institutions and individual users on the company's cloud-based services.
The company has said its engineering teams are continuing to monitor affected infrastructure and implement recovery measures until services are fully restored.
