Microsoft says services still returning amid widespread outage

Microsoft has said its popular email and other services were improving but not fully restored more than 24 hours after a mass outage disrupted communications worldwide. The outage , which began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday and affected users in 74 countries, was caused by overloaded servers that became “unexpectedly available,” the company reported.

There was no indication of a cyberattack or malicious activity, the tech giant said on Friday. “We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure,” the company said in a statement.

The outage affected Microsoft 365 services used by global businesses, institutions and individuals, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, its artificial intelligence (AI) tool. It was one of the longest in Microsoft’s history and the second disruption to its services this year.