A massive global outage impacting more than a dozen Microsoft cloud servicesincluding Outlook email and Teams messaging stretched into Friday as the tech giant struggled to restore the service, which is critical to the day-to-day functions of governments, schools and businesses around the world.
Starting around 12:50 p.m. ET Thursday, Microsoft began warning users of its products on social media that it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online,” its cloud email service.
By the time workers were arriving at the office on Friday morning, Microsoft said it was still working on the problem.
Microsoft said in its latest update about 7 a.m. ET that it was seeing “encouraging recovery progress in Europe, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure. “
It added that “North America is also improving; however, some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue.”
Hours earlier the tech giant had warned that attempts “to improve serviceability” were “not taking as expected,” it said in an update on X overnight.
Some on the social media platform derided the technical responses, or hoped email would be down Friday for a possible day off.
There are few products as pervasive inside global companies as Outlook email.
Email traffic to many of the tech giant’s 450 million users came to a halt around midday, with email programs freezing and crashing, and mobile devices unable to refresh inboxes or send messages.
The problems also affected Microsoft’s non-commercial consumer products, according to a notice on its website. “This issue impacts Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote To Do, Teams, and Microsoft 365 for the web.”
Throughout the day the problems spread. As of 11 p.m. ET on Thursday, Microsoft’s online status pages said its corporate services Exchange Online, Copilot, Microsoft Planner, Sharepoint, Microsoft To Do, Windows 365, cloud printing services, and mobile device management programs were all experiencing issues.
The problem caused chaos in workplaces around the world. At one, truck manufacturer Workhouse Group, it forced the company to delay its earnings report which was set to be released on Thursday afternoon.
In a statement, Workhorse said: “The rescheduling is due to business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outages taking place today.”
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office, the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department and other government agencies in California said their communications were impacted by the outage, NBC Los Angeles reported. In Washington, email services at federal agencies and on Capitol Hill were impacted.
In Colorado, the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office said the outage was affecting online bond payments for people being held in its detention facility. “Until Outlook email is restored, anyone needing to post bond for immediate release must do so in person at the jail,” it said on social media.
Throughout most of the day, Microsoft has said it has been working on the issue. By 2:50 p.m. ET, the company wrote on social media that it was “testing a configuration change” to its cloud servers in order to try to restore services.
By 4:40 p.m. ET, the company said it was restarting “affected servers to return them to service.”
Microsoft explained a few minutes later in another post on X that a “core process on affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, causing capacity loss.”
The company also said it was “shifting traffic” around in order to relieve overwhelmed servers that remained online.
But then not long after, the company again said, “The servers we returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic; we’re analyzing diagnostic data to determine what’s triggering the behavior.”
The updates continued into the night. At 11:36 p.m., Microsoft said it its efforts to improve server stability were ongoing, but that while it was “observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments” that didn’t result in “sustained recovery.”
NBC News attempted to reach Microsoft representatives through multiple phone numbers listed on the company’s press releases and through a phone number to its investor relations department, however the company has not commented in response.
An email sent to a public relations firm that represents Microsoft from a personal non-Outlook or Microsoft based email address quickly bounced back, with an error message reading that the server was “unavailable or unable to receive mail.”
In a statement to Bloomberg Newsa Microsoft spokesperson said: “We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.”
Major outages, such as Microsoft’s, are not unprecedented but have become increasingly rare. In 2024, a glitch with a security program led to Windows devices around the world freezing, causing them displaying Microsoft’s well-known “blue screen of death” error. That issue brought airlines, companies, and critical systems to a halt.
Some of Microsoft’s other critical cloud services, such as its Azure cloud computing platform, that powers many websites and apps, remained online and did not have any additional issues.
Source: www.nbcnews.com
