Thousands of users across the world may be unable to access their emails for a second day as a Microsoft 365 outage that hit critical services like Outlook, Teams and Copilot continued as the company said it is attempting to find a fix.
The company, however, said they are seeing “continued recovery progress” across the world, especially for users in North America and Europe.
“We’re also seeing encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, although some users may continue to experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said in an update early Friday morning.
Microsoft said the outage was affecting a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services. Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down.
“Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in the remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs,” the company said.
The extent of the outage wasn’t clear but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.
The company said it sees “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident” and will treat the outage with “urgency.”
Reports of the apparent connectivity issues began spiking shortly after noon Eastern on Thursday.
Microsoft added that the outage isn’t due to an increase in traffic, “but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”
The British government said it is “working closely” with Microsoft to assess any impact on public services but that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption.
British police forces said they’re unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call emergency responders to make any urgent reports.
The National Pharmacy Association said people could face delays getting their prescriptions because the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Service. Hospitals urged patients to attend appointments as usual.
In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which stemmed from a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows. That outage grounded flights and disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers.
Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.
Air India said its flight operations were unaffected by the global Microsoft outage. However, it temporarily rerouted its email services to ensure customer queries continued to reach the airline without interruption, the company said in a statement.
IndiGo, another Indian airline company, also reported disruptions to its email support services, which affected its ability to receive customer queries. The airline in a statement on X said its other support channels remained operational and its flight operations were unaffected.
The Philippines’ Supreme Court said in a statement on X that the ongoing Microsoft 365 service outage has affected some of its operations, including email responses.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage impacted the government’s IT infrastructure and that officials were “keeping a close eye on the developments.” Japanese authorities had taken steps including securing alternative communication tools such as telephones, the government said.
–with files from Associated Press
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