The Latest: Microsoft says recovery efforts are making progress on worldwide outage

Microsoft is fixing a massive global outage for its popular workplace software that dragged on into a second day, disrupting everything from emails to police emergency calls and AI tools.

A wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were affected.

Microsoft first flagged the problem on Thursday. It indicated that it was making some headway as it tried to restore services in fresh updates posted Friday on social media.

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 Latest on the outage:

The company indicated that its recovery efforts were making progress Friday, saying it was “seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements,” and that there was “incremental improvement in several workloads.”

But problems appeared to persist, according to an outage tracking site, status reports from organizations that depend on the company’s services and anecdotal reports on social media.

It was the sound of e-silence.

No Microsoft Outlook email chimes, no Teams message pings, no new notifications and, very possibly, no work getting done.

Microsoft 365 teetered on the edge of becoming Microsoft 364 as the global outage stretched from Thursday into, ironically (or fittingly, depending on your personal outlook), Friday the 13th. The disruption has impacted an unknown number of netizens, but the total could be as high as 450 million — the figure the tech giant touts as the number of paid customers of the Microsoft 365 apps.

Many of us were doing the same thing: Refresh, refresh, refresh.

But what really happens when an essential workplace tool goes quiet, and the silence is heard around the world?

Sadly, it seems, the extended break online did not mean that we went outside — or even offline. Thousands used the 21st century technology of social media to complain about the 20th century invention of email. Memes sprang up across the internet as brands like airlines rushed to capitalize early Friday on an unexpected long weekend.

It also said that “robust contingency plans” are in place to minimize disruption.

So far, the outages do not appear to have caused much of a problem to frontline services beyond the absence of emails.

Police forces have said they are unable to receive crime reports online and are urging people to call emergency responders to make any urgent reports.

The National Pharmacy Association also said there may be delays for some to get their prescriptions, as the outage is affecting the email systems of the state-run National Health Services.

Hospitals have meanwhile urged patients to attend appointments as normal.

U.S.-based industrial technology company Workhorse Group Inc. delayed a conference call for its quarterly earnings because of the outage.

In Australia, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Friday that Microsoft had likened the widespread outage to the CrowdStrike outage in 2024.

Burke said he had spoken to Microsoft’s top executive in Australia and the government’s national cybersecurity coordinator about the global disruption.

“They (Microsoft) don’t believe they are dealing with a cyberattack. They believe that they are dealing in some ways (with something) similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke told reporters in Sydney.

In July 2024, a massive global tech outage grounded flights, disrupted hospitals, banks and retailers, with Texas-based cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike blaming a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows that allowed its systems to push bad data out to millions of customer machines.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said it was trying different ways to identify the cause of the problem and get its servers back online, using “a measured approach to identify and repair affected infrastructure.”

Over 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft said on its website.

Roughly 130,000 users from dozens of countries reported problems accessing Outlook on the outage tracker Downdetector on Thursday, although reports have since declined.

A series of posts by the company on X suggested its engineers were struggling to get the problem fully under control.

Hours after saying it managed to successfully restore service health and functionality, the company said it had updated its list of impacted services and was continuing to address the issue.

Its most recent post offered little hope for users expecting a quick resolution.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company wrote.

In a more recent update Friday, Microsoft said “we’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue.”