REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft said Friday morning it was making steady headway on a worldwide failure that cut millions of people off from Outlook email, Teams scheduling and other workplace tools for most of a day.
Trouble started around 12:50 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, when large numbers of users began reporting they could not reach their mailboxes. The company first posted that it was looking into problems with Exchange Online, the cloud service behind Outlook.
By Friday, Microsoft said a large group of its servers had gone down without warning, and that the resulting strain spread the damage across its cloud services. It said engineers saw improved server stability after a patch to an authentication and routing configuration component on part of its network. The company also said it found no evidence of malicious activity.
The disruption reached well past email. Copilot, the company AI assistant, could not load or answer for some users. Device management through Intune was hit at times. In Teams, calls, chats and meetings largely kept working, but calendar invites and scheduling failed for many accounts. Microsoft listed no issues with its Azure platform.
Businesses, governments and schools on several continents felt the effects, and some police and court systems lost access to email.
Once service is fully back, Microsoft said, it will release a post-incident review explaining what caused the failure and how it plans to keep it from happening again. Some users may still see delayed mail and intermittent access problems as service returns.
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