A growing number of Microsoft users regained access to email and other services on Friday following a massive server issue that lasted more than 20 hours and disrupted millions of customers. Engineers worked to resolve connectivity problems that started shortly before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.
Impact on Services and Recovery Progress
Email and calendar service Outlook, along with multiple Microsoft 365 services such as Sharepoint and Copilot, experienced major outages during Friday morning in the U.S. and throughout Asian and European business days. Numerous external services connected to Microsoft products also suffered disruptions. In an update around 10:30 a.m. ET, Microsoft reported encouraging recovery progress, stating that service availability and email delivery performance were improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.
In an earlier update Friday morning, Microsoft stated that email queues were approaching normal levels, though intermittent issues were expected during ongoing recovery efforts. Engineering teams took affected systems offline for fixes and brought them back in stages, prioritizing efforts to preserve delayed emails and reduce backlogs. The company extended the timeout window to 48 hours, allowing delayed emails to continue attempting delivery to protect messages.
Microsoft reported that it detected no malicious activity causing the outage. The company initially blamed the disruption on a traffic surge in part of its infrastructure alongside issues with a component responsible for processing server health. Initial updates on Thursday indicated that connectivity problems related to infrastructure elevated load across multiple regions, driven by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable and straining the remaining infrastructure while failing automated health checks. Microsoft shares traded largely flat on Friday.
Global Disruption and Reactions
Governments and businesses across Asia-Pacific and Europe monitored the situation as it caused widespread disruption. The U.K.’s National Health Service stated the outage affected some of its services, though patients should attend appointments as normal. A hospital group serving South West London and Surrey noted on X that calls might experience long waits due to the disruption.
Earnings reports for Swiss luxury goods giant Richemont were slightly delayed on Friday, while electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled its third-quarter results release from Nov. 12 to Nov. 16 due to business disruptions. Air India temporarily rerouted emails to continue receiving customer messages, confirming that flight operations remained unaffected. Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke stated in a press conference, as reported by Reuters, that Microsoft believes the situation shares similarities with the CrowdStrike incident where an update went awry.
James Owen, managing partner of Digital Risks at consultancy Control Risks, noted by phone that the incident highlights a business resilience and dependency issue decades in the making. He added that organizations are increasingly dependent on a smaller segment of technology and infrastructure critical to daily life and business activities. Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services and Google users also reported outages on Thursday. Amazon posted on X that its services were operating normally and that an unrelated disruption elsewhere on the internet prompted inaccurate news reports, directing users to its health dashboard for accurate data.
Microsoft validated an alternative service health check method at 4 p.m. ET on Thursday that brought some affected servers back online, and applied the change more broadly while preparing automated recovery systems to maintain service stability.
