Microsoft Continues Efforts to Restore Outlook and Teams Following Widespread Microsoft 365 Outage

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) said early Friday that it was continuing efforts to restore its Outlook and Teams services following a widespread disruption that began on Thursday and affected users across multiple regions.

The company reported that additional mitigation measures had been introduced across its Microsoft 365 platform, although technical issues were preventing some of the planned changes from being implemented successfully.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft said in a social media update.

The disruption affected several Microsoft 365 services, with Outlook and Teams accounting for a substantial share of user complaints. Reports indicated that the problems extended across multiple geographical regions, including Asia-Pacific and the Americas.

Downdetector Reports Thousands of Microsoft 365 Service Complaints

Downdetector, an online platform that monitors service interruptions through user reports, recorded at least 4,600 complaints relating to Microsoft 365 as of 00:19 ET (05:19 GMT) on Friday.

The number of reported problems had previously approached 50,000 overnight, indicating a substantial increase in complaints during the disruption.

The figures represent user-submitted reports rather than a confirmed count of affected customers or organisations.

Microsoft continued investigating the incident while implementing measures intended to restore normal service availability.

The company indicated that some of its corrective actions were not producing the expected results, complicating the recovery process.

Government Services and Technology Companies Report Disruptions

The outage affected organisations in both the public and private sectors, according to reports.

Some government services in the United States and Australia experienced disruptions, while artificial intelligence companies OpenAI and Anthropic were also among the organisations reported to have been affected.

The incident disrupted access to services used for workplace communications, email and collaboration, although the extent of the impact varied among users and organisations.

Microsoft acknowledged the continuing interruption and said its teams were working to resolve the problems.

“We appreciate your organization’s patience and understanding while we work with urgency to resolve this incident,” the company stated in its latest service update.

Microsoft Reportedly Does Not Suspect Cyberattack

According to reports, Microsoft did not believe that the service interruptions were the result of a cyberattack.

The company had not provided a confirmed explanation for the underlying cause in the information available at the time of its latest update.

Microsoft’s recovery efforts remained ongoing early Friday, with technical difficulties continuing to affect the implementation of some mitigation measures.

The company had not confirmed when all affected Microsoft 365 services would be fully restored.

Users and organisations continued monitoring Microsoft’s service status updates for further information on the recovery process.

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