A widespread outage involving Microsoft's Outlook e-mail and other applications stretched into Friday morning as the company said it was working to restore service and that they are "seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue."
The tech giant first posted a statement on social media saying it was "investigating reports of users experiencing issues" accessing online mailboxes shortly before 1:00 Eastern time Thursday.
Downdetector, which monitors outages, reported issues with Outlook, Teams and other products on Thursday, as Microsoft attempted to deploy several fixes.
"We regret that today's outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue," Charles Lamanna, Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft, said late Thursday on social media. "We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity."
The company has been providing updates on steps to resolve the outage on its Microsoft 365 Status social media account, providing a window into the hours-long effort to troubleshoot the disruption.
"We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure," the company said on social media. "Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue. We're focused on recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction."
Earlier Thursday, the company said: "We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service."
Around 6:00 PM Eastern Time Thursday, the company said it was "returning a portion of affected servers to the service, and they remain stable so far," though later updated that the servers "can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic" and was working on a fix for that.
