Microsoft struggles to restore online services after major outage
Microsoft 365 services including Outlook and Teams have been experiencing issues for nearly 24 hours
Microsoft is struggling to restore its online services after an unprecedented outage, with many services, including Outlook and Teams, unavailable for nearly 24 hours.
The corporation first confirmed the issues on Thursday, and it’s been updating hourly on its efforts to bring them back online. It claims the problem was caused by higher-than-usual stress on its servers.
As of Friday morning, the company claimed that “recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases”, but this has seemingly resulted in little end result for users over the 18 hours it’s been updating.
According to Down Detector, hundreds of users report that Xbox Live is affected by the outage, even though Microsoft’s official status page claims everything is working fine (and VGC’s tests suggest this is the case).
The same source claims that Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, and OneDrive remain offline for many users.
Meanwhile, according to the BBC, the outage has affected British NHS and police services, along with airports and schools, which are warning people about emails being down and finding workarounds to help keep in contact.
Microsoft said in its latest update: “We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure.
“Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue. We’re focused on recovery for the remaining affected environments while prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction.”
