Microsoft has reported progress in restoring its popular workplace services as a global outage entered its second day, disrupting business communications, emergency police calls, court operations and access to artificial intelligence tools.
The disruption affected several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot, leaving users worldwide unable to access email and other essential workplace tools.
In updates posted on social media on Friday, Microsoft said service availability was gradually improving and email delivery was returning to normal across an increasing number of affected systems.
“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress,” the company said, adding that service availability and email delivery performance had improved across a growing portion of its affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure. Some users also began reporting that their email services had been restored.
Microsoft’s service status updates indicated broader improvements in North America and sustained recovery across much of Europe. The company also reported positive signs of recovery in the Asia-Pacific region.
However, Microsoft cautioned that some customers could continue to experience intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery as engineers worked to restore the remaining affected systems.
The exact number of people impacted by the outage remains unclear. Microsoft said in January that it had more than 450 million paid commercial Microsoft 365 subscriptions.
Microsoft Intensifies Recovery Efforts
The technology giant, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, said it was exploring different approaches to identify the underlying cause of the disruption and restore affected servers.
The company described its response as a measured process aimed at identifying and repairing the affected infrastructure. It also said there was no indication that the outage had been caused by malicious activity.
Microsoft pledged to treat the incident with urgency and make it a priority until all services were fully restored.
A series of around 20 updates posted by the company on X highlighted the challenges its engineering teams faced in bringing the affected services back online. In one update, Microsoft acknowledged that some of its recovery changes were not producing the expected results, raising concerns about how quickly normal operations could resume.
By Friday morning, however, the company reported early signs of stabilisation, improved system capacity and gradual recovery across several services.
It also confirmed improvements in key functions, including mailbox access and the processing of delayed emails, although some users could still experience intermittent disruptions.
In its latest update, Microsoft said its immediate focus was on restoring the remaining affected environments, prioritising email queue management and clearing the backlog of undelivered messages. The company continues to work towards a complete restoration of Microsoft 365 services.