Microsoft says its Outlook email service and other Microsoft 365 platforms are showing signs of recovery after a major global outage disrupted businesses, government services and millions of users worldwide.
The technology giant said email delivery performance was improving across affected infrastructure, with some users regaining access to their inboxes.
However, Microsoft warned that intermittent disruptions and delayed emails could continue as engineers work to fully restore services.
The outage, which began on Thursday (12), affected several Microsoft services, including Outlook, Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams and Copilot.
Users across multiple countries reported difficulties accessing email accounts, sending and receiving messages, and connecting to Microsoft 365 applications.
According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, nearly 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook were recorded shortly after the disruption began.
The outage also affected government institutions and businesses in several countries, including Japan, Singapore, Norway and the United Kingdom.
In Britain, disruptions affected court proceedings, online police reporting systems and services linked to medical prescriptions.
Microsoft said its investigation found that some affected servers had become overwhelmed and stopped processing connection requests, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure.
The company began restarting affected servers, redirecting traffic and implementing configuration changes to restore services.
Microsoft also reported improvements in service availability and email delivery across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
However, the company has not confirmed a complete restoration of all affected services.
Microsoft said it had found no indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity, although investigations into the underlying cause were continuing.
The company said recovery efforts would continue until services were fully restored.
The disruption is among the latest major technology outages to highlight the global dependence of businesses and public institutions on cloud-based communication services. (Newswire)