Microsoft customers around the world reported outages on its products Thursday. (NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Microsoft was still investigating a global outage Friday that left users unable to access Outlook email and other products.
Businesses and governments were also affected by the massive outage. Outlook has more than an estimated 400 million active users worldwide. Teams is used by a reported 320 million people.
The company said it had not yet found a fix for the issue, which affects multiple Microsoft 365 services that rely on Exchange Online, its email platform.
In an update Friday at 7:09 a.m. ET, the company indicated it was making progress but still unable to resolve the issue.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” Microsoft posted on X. “Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue.”
Microsoft did not provide a specific cause for the outage, but said the issue related to a number of servers being “unexpectedly unavailable.” Microsoft executive vice president Charles Lamanna said on X there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”
Government agencies in Japan, Singapore and Australia were among those affected, while the US House of Representatives was also impacted by the outage. Politico reported one House staffer saying, “There goes a day of legislative work.”
AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic also reported facing issues.
In the U.K, police and health services were impacted. In Taiwan, Reuters reported that one finance company started using fax machines to confirm trades.
Australian home affairs minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had said it was dealing with something similar to the massive CrowdStrike outage in 2024.
The problem began on Thursday, with tracking site Downdetector showing a major spike in outage reports that hit a peak just before 1 p.m. ET. Users reported problems with its Outlook, Copilot, Teams and Sharepoint services, and some even reported problems accessing Microsoft Word and Excel.
At 10:13 p.m. ET, Microsoft said its attempts to fix the issue were “not taking as expected.”
In a message posted Thursday at 12:54 p.m. ET on the official Microsoft 365 Status account on X, the company said it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.”
It subsequently confirmed that the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users “in any region.”
Microsoft suffered another widespread outage in September, when the Microsoft 365 suite, which includes Outlook, was down for several days.
