Microsoft reports recovery progress after global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot
Microsoft said on Friday it was seeing “encouraging” recovery after a global outage that began around noon Eastern time on Thursday and quickly spread to more than 70 countries and territories, disrupting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other services for millions of users at schools, government agencies and offices. The Redmond, Washington–based company reported widespread improvements, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of the affected infrastructure, while remaining focused on residual impact and reliable restoration.
According to the outage-tracking site Downdetector, the disruption hit some of Microsoft’s most widely used products: Outlook email, Teams workplace messaging and video calling, and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot. In a Friday statement, Microsoft said there was no indication the episode resulted from malicious or cyber activity, and that the failure was a technical issue not related to cyber or A.I. agents. It has not yet given a clear account of what went wrong, but has promised a public report identifying the root cause. The picture as of Friday afternoon was of improving but still incomplete restoration after a second day of disruption.
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