Microsoft ‘seeing encouraging recovery progress’ in global Outlook, Teams outage

Microsoft is still working to restore access to its services after a massive global outage impacted dozens of its services on Thursday.

The company said early Friday that it is “seeing encouraging recovery progress” according to a statement shared on social media.

“Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue,” it reads. “We’re focused on recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction.”

Microsoft reported that the outage started at 11:17 a.m. EST on Thursday, impacting services like Outlook and Teams. Users began reporting problems accessing their email services at around 12:21 p.m., according to Downdetector.

The company has not shared a cause for this outage, but it stated that the disruption was not caused by a cybersecurity breach.

The interruption, however, had widespread impacts for companies and services across the country, hitting congressional offices, city governments and other businesses.

The City of Austin said in a Thursday evening advisory that its employees were unable to send or receive emails and encouraged residents to use phone lines to call their offices or 911 if needed.

The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado said the Outlook outage also affected its online bond payment platform for people being held in their detention facility.

“Until Outlook is restored, anyone needing to post bond for immediate release must do so in person at the jail,” the office wrote in a Facebook post.

The outage also had impacts across borders, hitting 74 countries within one hour, according to Downdetector data.

The United Kingdom’s National Pharmacy Association said in a Friday statement that Microsoft email disruptions were affecting the ability of pharmacies to communicate with doctors.

“Please bear with your pharmacy teams today, where waits may be longer than normal and there may be delays to some prescriptions,” the association wrote.