Microsoft has reported "early signs of stabilisation" after a global outage disrupted access to Outlook, Teams and Copilot for millions of users, but services have not yet been fully restored.
Charles Lamanna, the company's executive vice-president, said the problem is being worked on with "urgency" and that the outage does not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.
Global impact and official response
The disruption began late on Thursday and has affected governments, banks, police forces and health services among others. A UK government spokesperson said: "We are working closely with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, with robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption."
Police forces have said they cannot receive crime reports online and are urging people to call either 101 or 999 to make any urgent reports. The National Pharmacy Association said there may also be delays to some NHS patients getting their prescriptions, as the outage is affecting NHS email systems.
Stabilisation efforts and user reports
On its Microsoft 365 status page, the firm said: "We are seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced."
Monitoring website Downtetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday. At its peak last night, more than 130,000 people were reporting Outlook issues in the US. Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector.
Problems were flagged from countries including the UK, US, India and New Zealand. Reports about Outlook peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level, the monitoring site added. On Friday, users from about 60 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, continued to record trouble.
Recovery efforts and next steps
Microsoft had earlier said fixes to resolve the problem were not working "as expected", but in its latest update on Microsoft 365 products, it gave some hope of a solution. It said: "Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery. As part of this effort, we are extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues."
The group said it was "not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident" and added: "We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation and we will share a full post-incident report with root cause and defence-in-depth actions after recovery is complete."
Microsoft has not yet fully restored services following the outage, which has caused widespread disruption since late Thursday.
