Microsoft said on Friday that it was seeing early signs of recovery from a major outage that has disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services for more than a day, after fixes it applied failed to work as intended.
From Asia to the United States, the disruption affected users, companies and some government operations while the company struggled to fix the problem, the Associated Press reported.
Recovery slow and uneven
On Friday morning, Microsoft said it was seeing “continued recovery progress,” with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe and encouraging signs in Asia Pacific. It warned that some users could still face intermittent access problems or delayed email delivery. CBS News reported that complaints had begun to wane by Friday morning, according to Downdetector.
The road there was rough. At one point, Microsoft posted on X that it had monitored changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they were “not taking as expected,” a message that offered little hope of a quick resolution. Microsoft said it had no indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and that it would treat the incident with urgency and priority until full resolution.
How it began
The trouble started on Thursday. Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps stayed disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours, Reuters reported, and reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 around 1 pm ET. Microsoft said the issues were primarily with Exchange Online, and that as capacity was restored, clients would reconnect gradually.
As the outage wore on, Microsoft expanded its list of affected services to include Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Defender XDR, Planner, To Do and Purview, XDA reported. Microsoft said some servers had become unexpectedly unavailable and that the disruption was not caused by increased traffic, The Korea Times reported.
Governments and businesses affected
Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said government emails were down and that it was working with Microsoft to fix the problem. The Philippines’ Supreme Court said the outage had affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had likened the outage to the CrowdStrike outage of 2024. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group postponed its third-quarter results from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruptions. The outage also hit connectors used by AI services from OpenAI and Anthropic.
Scale and a pattern
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, according to the company. The incident follows an outage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform last month that disrupted its productivity software and industries worldwide. It is also the second large Microsoft 365 failure in 2026. In January, an outage lasted nearly 10 hours, with Microsoft blaming a portion of its North American service infrastructure that was not processing traffic as expected, The Register reported.
Microsoft has not said what caused the latest failure or when full service will be restored. Its customers, many of whom depend on Microsoft 365 for core operations, are likely to press for answers once recovery is complete.
