Microsoft's Outage Drags Into Friday as First Fixes Fall Short and Outlook and Teams Users Wait Worldwide

Microsoft's outage of Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services stretched past midnight into Friday, with the company acknowledging that its first round of fixes did not deliver the results it expected and that only a "limited recovery" had taken hold.

The disruption began Thursday afternoon in the Americas and kept users locked out of email and workplace tools for more than five hours, NTD News reported. By late Thursday night Eastern time, The Times of India reported that Microsoft said the changes it had applied were not working as hoped, and that nearly 130,000 users worldwide had reported connection problems with Outlook and Teams. The Hindu reported that a Downdetector outage map showed trouble across the Americas and in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Microsoft has said a portion of its infrastructure was under elevated load, which it believes contributed to the connection errors, and The Times of India reported that the company said the strain was not caused by a surge in user traffic. The New York Times reported that Microsoft said some of its servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, putting extra pressure on the rest of its systems while engineers worked to bring customers back online.

With the first fix falling short, Microsoft said it was working on alternate workstreams to restore service, according to the Hindustan Times. The Guardian reported that an alert on Microsoft's site said the company was "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," and that reports of problems were still coming in on Friday morning in Europe.

The timing is spreading the pain around the globe. As the outage dragged on overnight in the United States, it reached the start of the workday in Asia, where The Hindu reported that many users in India woke up to find their work inboxes unreachable. For American businesses, schools and government offices that run their email and meetings through Microsoft's cloud, the question now is whether Friday morning starts normally.

Because Outlook and Teams are where many offices keep both their email and their meetings, the outage has hit workplaces twice over, cutting off messages and calls at the same time, with connection problems reported on both services. NTD News reported that other Microsoft apps were disrupted as well.

The outage is a reminder of how much of daily American life now runs through a handful of giant cloud providers. When one company's servers stumble, small businesses, hospitals, churches, schools and local governments can all lose their email at once, with no local backup to fall back on. Simple steps help: keep important phone numbers and documents somewhere other than your inbox, and check whether your organization has a backup way to reach staff.

Microsoft has not said when full service will return. We are tracking the outage and will update this story as the company reports progress.