Microsoft’s Global Outage and Fixes: What We Know

The company described “encouraging” progress on efforts to overcome a second day of disruptions to its email, messaging and other services. Microsoft is reporting widespread improvements to its services after a global outage took them offline on Thursday, disrupting communications and work at schools, government agencies and offices around the world.

The company, headquartered in Redmond, Wash., said on Friday that it was seeing “encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.” Outages started disrupting Microsoft tools and apps around noon Eastern time on Thursday and quickly spread to more than 70 countries and territories, affecting millions of users, according to Downdetector , an outage-tracking site. Some of Microsoft’s most popular products, including the email manager Outlook, the workplace messaging and video calling app Teams and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, stopped working.