Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
The extent of the outage wasn’t clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
The company indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress Friday, saying it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements,” and that there was "incremental improvement in several workloads." But problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company's services and anecdotal reports on social media.
Microsoft scrambles to recover services
The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”
The company said it did not have any indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity and would treat the incident “with urgency and priority until full resolution.”
A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.
Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.
An earlier post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote.
In a pair of more recent updates on Friday, Microsoft said “we’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.”
“Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases,” the company said in a second post. “We’re seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.”
