Microsoft gradually restores services after global outage

Microsoft ↗ 0.36% said Friday that traffic is "being gradually restored" after a global outage knocked out Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The disruption, which began Thursday, has now run into a second day. "We've made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region," the company said, adding that mailbox access and delayed email processing were improving but that "some users may continue to experience intermittent issues". Microsoft has not given a timeline for full recovery.cbsnews.com+1

The company said its next step is to extend those recovery actions to other regions while it keeps working on stability and adds capacity.cbsnews.com

A slow, uneven fix

Users started reporting that they couldn't reach Outlook at about 16:00 GMT on Thursday, November 12. Within about an hour, Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories. US Outlook reports peaked at more than 130,000 around 1 p.m. ET. USA Today recorded the peak as 128,874 reports at 1:09 p.m. ET.aljazeera.com+2

The early repairs didn't hold. Microsoft said adjustments to affected servers "did not result in sustained recovery". It later said a change it had applied was "not taking as expected". On Thursday night, Microsoft said a process on the affected servers "responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed." It also said it had begun reverting a recent network configuration change that "correlates with the start of impact".reuters.com+2

At around 4:15 a.m. ET on Friday, the company extended its email timeout window to 48 hours "to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues". Microsoft also said it was seeing "early signs of stabilisation," although service capacity "has not yet returned to normal levels".lbc.co.uk+1

Governments and courts disrupted

The outage disrupted government systems in Singapore and Japan, communications at the Supreme Court of the Philippines, and Australian agencies including the federal police. By Friday, users in about 60 countries, mostly in Europe and Asia, were still reporting problems.irishnews.com+1

No sign of an attack

Microsoft said it has "no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident." It said it will share "a full post-incident report with root cause and defence-in-depth actions after recovery is complete". Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed the situation was "similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry".irishnews.com+1