Health care providers, schools and governmental bodies are among those affected.
Microsoft services that went down amid a widespread outage are gradually coming back online, the company said. An issue that impacted Microsoft 365 on Thursday afternoon took out services such as Outlook, Teams and Copilot 365, disrupting businesses and organizations around the world.
The company toiled overnight to restore service. Around 10PM ET on Thursday, it said some attempts to "improve serviceability" didn't work as hoped. By 2:45AM the following morning, though, it was "seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of our latest traffic optimization actions."
Around 8:30AM, the company reported "continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific." In an update 45 minutes later, Microsoft said that while some people might be experiencing delayed email deliveries in Outlook or spotty connectivity, it was seeing "sustained improvements" in availability of affected services.
"We're seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure," the company said in an update at 10:39AM.
