Microsoft has reported progress in restoring its workplace software services after a global outage entered its second day, disrupting business communications, police crime reporting, court operations and access to artificial intelligence tools.
The disruption, which affected several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot, left individuals, businesses and institutions across the world unable to access email and other essential platforms.
In its latest update on Friday, the company said service availability and email delivery performance were improving across an increasing proportion of its affected infrastructure.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure,” Microsoft said, as some users began reporting that their email services had been restored.
The company reported broader improvements in North America, sustained recovery across much of Europe and encouraging signs of improvement in the Asia-Pacific region.
However, it warned that some users could continue experiencing intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery as engineers worked to restore the remaining affected infrastructure.
Microsoft said email queues had reduced significantly and were approaching normal levels, indicating further progress in its recovery efforts.
The company, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, first reported technical problems shortly before 1pm Eastern time on Thursday.
Its initial recovery efforts proved challenging, with engineers acknowledging that measures implemented to restore services had not delivered the expected results.
“Our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” the company said in one of a series of 22 updates published on X.
By Friday morning, however, signs of stabilisation had emerged, although Microsoft maintained that some users could still experience disruptions as recovery continued.
The full number of people affected by the outage remains unclear. However, Microsoft disclosed in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
There has so far been no indication that the disruption resulted from malicious activity, according to the company.
The outage also affected public services in Europe, with Britain experiencing disruptions to government and judicial operations.
In Manchester, a trial was halted after Judge Maurice Greene sent jurors home because of delays linked to the outage. He said the incident demonstrated the risks associated with the courts’ reliance on technology.
The British government said it was working closely with Microsoft to assess the impact on public services, adding that robust contingency plans were in place to minimise disruption.
