Microsoft reported "additional progress" on Friday in restoring services following a widespread global outage that disrupted access to Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams and other products for more than 12 hours.
The company said it was seeing “encouraging recovery progress” in Europe, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of the affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure.
In a statement, Microsoft said it was making “additional progress toward recovery” and that traffic was “being gradually restored.” It also reported improvements in key areas, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, while warning that some intermittent issues could continue.
In an update, Microsoft said email delivery performance was improving across an increasing portion of its infrastructure, adding that recovery efforts remained focused on the environments still affected by the disruption.
“Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue,” the company said, noting that reducing email queues and backlogs remained a priority.
Microsoft also said an extended 48-hour email timeout window would remain in place to help protect delayed messages while delivery catches up.
Earlier in its recovery efforts, the company said it had observed “marginal success” after applying patches and rebooting infrastructure.
In subsequent updates published on its Service Health Status page, Microsoft said it was continuing to monitor activity across regions, assess server performance and evaluate measures to improve system capacity.
The company later reported that its traffic optimization measures had delivered “positive results for service stability and increased capacity.”
According to Microsoft's latest regional update, Japan remained comparatively more stable, while North America was also showing improvement. However, the company said some users across affected regions could still experience intermittent problems as recovery actions continued.
The developments offered further signs of progress after earlier recovery attempts failed to produce the expected results, leaving millions of users with connectivity problems.
Microsoft had previously identified unexpectedly unavailable servers as the main factor behind the disruption, which placed additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure.
The outage affected Exchange Online mailboxes and disrupted access to Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams across multiple regions.
According to Downdetector, the number of outage reports in the US exceeded 97,000 for Outlook, 38,000 for Microsoft 365 and 4,500 for Teams.
Microsoft said it had “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident” and pledged to continue treating the disruption as a priority until full mitigation.
The company said it would publish a comprehensive post-incident report once mitigation is complete, outlining the root cause and the measures it plans to take to strengthen infrastructure resilience.
Source: Anadolu Agency
-Agencies
