Microsoft 365 and Outlook outage enters second day as service slowly recovers

Microsoft 365 and Outlook went down globally on Thursday, and the disruption carried into Friday, affecting millions of users. Services including Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and other 365 apps were hit, and many users could not reach their email. By Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing recovery across North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, though some users still faced intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery. Microsoft extended its email timeout to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages. A company statement called the outage a technical issue and said it was not related to cyber activity, AI agents, or DDoS attacks. The disruption reached beyond business. Hospitals, police departments, schools, courts, and banks were affected, and in Japan it disrupted government IT systems. Microsoft has said it will share a full post-incident report with the root cause once mitigation is complete.