Microsoft said progress is being made in bringing its popular workplace software back online as a global outage enters its second day, disrupting business communications, police emergency calls, court operations and AI tools. The outage, which affected a wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, left many complaining they couldn’t access their emails. Microsoft indicated that it was making some headway as it tried to restore services, in fresh updates posted Friday on social media. “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 in its latest update, as some users started reporting that their emails were restored. On a separate status page, the company reported “broader improvements” in North America and “sustained improvements across much of Europe,” as well as “encouraging recovery signals” in the Asia-Pacific region. Some users could still have “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said. The total number of people affected is not clear, but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions. Microsoft scrambles to recover services The Redmond, Wash.-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem, which it flagged 18 hours earlier on Thursday, and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.” The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.” A series of 20 posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control. One post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution, saying the changes were “not taking as expected,” the company wrote. By Friday morning, Microsoft reported “early stabilization and capacity improvements” and “incremental improvement in several workloads.” “We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue,” it said in a subsequent post. In its latest post, the company said it was focusing on “recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction.” Europe woke up to disruptions In Britain, the outage brought a halt to a trial in Manchester. Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home because of delays that he said illustrated the danger of the court’s reliance on technology. The British government said it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services but that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption. British police forces said they’re unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call emergency responders to make any urgent reports. The National Pharmacy Association said people could face delays getting their prescriptions because the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Service. In Norway, the government said the outage affected “several ministries,” including losing email access, and it had “not received any indication” about when the problem would be resolved. Asian businesses and governments were affected In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. That outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers. 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. 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, an Asian financial hub, also saw part of their operations disrupted. Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global 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, 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 that government emails were down and that the agency is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue. The Philippines’ Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the outage affected some of its operations, 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 had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools such as telephones, the government said. U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 tools, underscoring the ripple effects of outages as more people use artificial intelligence platforms to interact with other companies’ software. ------ By Chan Ho-him And Kelvin Chan AP journalists Adam Schreck in Bangkok, Eileen Ng in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Rod McGuirk in Melbourne, Australia, Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi, Mayuko Ono in Tokyo, Geir Moulson in Berlin and Pan Pylas and Brian Melley in London contributed.
