Microsoft said on Friday that it is working on several fronts to restore its services, but its fixes have so far brought only partial recovery. The company has not given a timeline for full restoration.
"We're engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact, address our current blocker, and returning portions of service infrastructure back to a healthy state," Microsoft 365 Status said on X.
In a later post, it said: "We're continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimization actions to improve service stability and increase capacity."
The company pointed customers to incident MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, and to status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is unavailable.
Partial Recovery, Not A Sustained One
Its latest update, microsoft said engineers were adjusting traffic protocols, redistributing traffic and applying "strategic traffic blocking measures".
"We're observing partial recovery across regions in which we've applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren't resulting in sustained recovery, so we're reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability," it said. That update referred to incidents EX1550543 and MO1550821.
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Status On Microsoft's Service Health Page
Microsoft's Service Health Status page shows:
- Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise): service degradation. The page warns that users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.
- Microsoft Azure: no Azure issues detected at this time.
- Power Platform Admin Center: no incident flagged. The page is updated only when service issues prevent tenant administrators from reaching the admin center.
- Microsoft consumer products: Service degradation.
- Exchange Online: Users may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed.
- Microsoft 365 admin center: Admins may be unable to load some admin center pages.
- Microsoft 365 apps: Users may be unable to view their recently used files.
- Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center: Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory are affected.
- Microsoft 365 Education: Features including Assignments, Reading Progress, and Speaker Progress may be impacted.
- Microsoft Copilot 365: Users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop
How The Outage Unfolded
The problems began on Thursday, when Microsoft first flagged trouble with Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas shortly before 1 p.m. GMT. It later warned that the issue could affect connectivity for users in any region. Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 Outlook reports from 74 countries and territories within about an hour.
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Outlook, Teams and Copilot were among the affected services, with users unable to open mailboxes and email delivery delayed. ITdaily said servers that Microsoft restored were failing again, and that a separate consumer incident affected Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, To Do and Teams. A Microsoft executive, Charles Lamanna, has said there was no cyberattack, according to Gadgetbridge. Microsoft has not said how many users were hit.
Indian businesses felt the effects too. IndiGo said in a service advisory that a global Microsoft service disruption had affected its email support, and asked customers to use other support channels.
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