Microsoft’s workplace services, including Outlook and its Copilot AI assistant, were still experiencing major disruptions Friday, as a global outage entered its second day. Businesses and millions of users were left dealing with interruptions to routine work.
The company said it had found no evidence that the outage was caused by a cyberattack or other malicious activity.
In updates issued at 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. ET, Microsoft reported signs of recovery in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Japan’s services were comparatively stable, the company said. North America was also improving by 7 a.m., though some users could continue to encounter intermittent problems while recovery work continued.
The outage began Thursday afternoon and affected Exchange Online, the service that underpins Microsoft’s email system. By Friday morning, many Outlook users still couldn’t open their inboxes or send and receive messages as engineers worked through delayed email queues.
Microsoft extended the delivery timeout for emails to 48 hours to give delayed messages more time to reach recipients. Ordinarily, a mail server may return an undelivered message to its sender after a set period. Under the extended window, emails held up since Thursday afternoon could continue to be delivered until at least Saturday afternoon.
Outlook problems also affected scheduling tools. Users reported difficulty viewing calendars, sending meeting invitations and editing existing events.
Other Microsoft workplace apps were affected, too. Some users couldn’t access recently used files in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, while external file sharing in SharePoint Online was disrupted.
Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant built into Microsoft 365, also remained significantly impaired. Users reported trouble loading chats, generating responses and retrieving information from their emails, calendars and files.
