Microsoft said Friday that it had seen “encouraging recovery progress” amid a major outage of its email, meeting and other office tools that began Thursday and stretched to the end of the workweek.
The company said the incident was not a cyberattack and stemmed from a network change that was supposed to upgrade its capacity.
“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously,” the company said.
The outage had snarled operations around the world and across the United States — for schools, businesses, courts, police departments, hospitals, government agencies, offices and other entities relying on Microsoft email.
European stock market operator Euronext said it was “unable to receive emails” and advised listed companies to communicate by phone. In Japan, some traders resorted to sending messages by fax, local media reported.
In Maine, state courts asked people seeking restraining orders to consider filing on paper because they could not guarantee that requests sent over email had gone through. In Arapahoe County, Colorado, the sheriff’s office said it was unable to process bond payments over email and asked people to come in person to the jail instead.
The exact scope of the outage and pace of the recovery were not immediately clear. But Microsoft said Friday morning that it was seeing improvements in service availability, with email queues “approaching normal levels.” Cities and businesses also began reporting that their services had been restored.
“Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues,” the company said.
But the outage and its length were extraordinary for such a major tech provider. For many office workers stuck at their keyboards, it was both a headache and a relief from the drudgeries of day-to-day work.
“EMAILS ARE DOWN AND FAST FOOD PRICES ARE UP,” wrote the restaurant chain Chili’s on social media, offering free meal deals to people who might ignore their emails to reply with how much they paid for “value meals” at other chains.
The outage may have even gotten in the way of the tracking of a humpback whale in the Hudson River. Gotham Whale, a New York City-based marine mammal tracker, put out a call for tips to its email line before asking people to use direct messages instead.
In initial reports on Thursday, Microsoft said the servers were experiencing an “elevated load,” not because of increased traffic but “by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”
But the company’s subsequent updates — made in technical language on social media — suggested that engineers had been struggling to resolve the issue and appeared to add to user confusion. “We’re opening all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” the company said in a Thursday afternoon statement.
Late Thursday, Microsoft said on social media that it had restored a portion of the affected servers that remained stable — “so far.” Then, an hour later, there was an issue: The servers that had returned to service, the company said, “can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic.”
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday morning — though an automated receipt indicated that servers were working well enough for the email from The Washington Post to go through.
The outage affected email services and other features that interact with Microsoft’s cloud-based messaging platform “Exchange Online,” which delivers email, calendar, contacts and tasks.
Service providers, businesses and members of the public around the world scrambled to find work-arounds as they started their days on Friday to find Outlook and other Microsoft services still down.
In Britain, some schools and public health services were affected, while several major police forces asked the public to call rather than use online forms to make a report, the BBC reported. Top courts in both Britain and the Philippines said email services were down.
Cybersecurity organizations warned people to watch out for scammers pretending to be from Microsoft or other IT companies.
Anthropic and OpenAI also reported issues with their services with Microsoft 365 connectors. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
It was not clear how many users were affected, but monitoring site Downdetector said almost 130,000 problems with Microsoft Outlook had been reported by U.S. users just after 1 p.m. Thursday, with outage reports reaching 74 countries and territories in about an hour.
The company has previously said that more than 430 million people use its Microsoft 365 apps.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said late Thursday that he regretted the disruptions caused by the outages. “For now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” he added.
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