Microsoft Says Outlook and Teams Are Recovering After Thursday Outage
Microsoft said on Friday that its services were recovering after a Thursday outage that knocked out Outlook email, Teams video calls and other products. The company said it is still working through the damage, and some people may keep seeing problems for a while.
The outage began on Thursday morning in the United States. Microsoft said it spread to other regions around the world, affecting its Microsoft 365 platform for users far from the US.
On Friday, Microsoft said it had put in extra fixes, which it calls mitigation measures, and was bringing back the remaining affected equipment. The company said email queues, meaning messages waiting to be delivered, had dropped significantly and were close to normal levels. Still, Microsoft warned that some users may still have intermittent access problems or delayed email delivery.
Microsoft has ruled out malicious activity as the cause. It had not yet said what did cause the outage as of its Friday update. The company has promised a full post-incident report, covering the root cause and the extra protections it plans to add, once the fix is complete.
Microsoft's public status page lists a service degradation for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers, as well as for its consumer products. The company says users may be unable to connect to several Microsoft 365 services. It posted updates on that public page because administrators may not be able to reach the Service health page inside the admin center.
For people who depend on these tools for work, a stalled inbox or a failed video call can disrupt the whole day. Microsoft has not said how long full recovery will take. For now, the company says it is watching service health closely and checking that users can get back in through every connection method.
