Microsoft has reported "early signs of stabilisation" but has not yet fully restored services after a global outage left millions without access to emails and Teams worldwide. The tech giant said it is working with "urgency" to find a fix for the issue, which has caused widespread disruption since late Thursday, affecting governments, banks, police forces and health services.
Stabilisation efforts under way
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."
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."
Widespread disruption reported
The issue began late on Thursday, leaving users unable to access many popular services, with thousands worldwide reporting they could not send or receive emails through Outlook. Teams has also been affected, along with the tech giant's Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services.
Police forces have said they are unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call 101 or 999 for urgent reports. The National Pharmacy Association said there may also be delays to some NHS patients getting prescriptions, as the outage is affecting NHS email systems.
Impact and recovery
Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday, with more than 130,000 reporting Outlook issues in the US at its peak last night. Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna said the outages did not appear to be the result of a cyber attack.
The firm 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 company added.
Microsoft previously said it was seeing "positive results for server stability" from a patch put in place to fix the issue. 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."
Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector, with problems flagged from countries including the UK, US, India and New Zealand. Reports about Outlook peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level. On Friday, users from about 60 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, continue to record trouble, and courts, charities and banks around the world have also reported outages.
