Microsoft doesn’t ‘have an ETA for full recovery’ on outage yet
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Microsoft systems, including Outlook and Teams, experienced an outage starting Thursday.
- The company doesn’t suspect a cyberattack or other malicious activity.
- Service is improving, but not for everyone.
Microsoft is making progress in resolving the massive global outage that started Thursday morning and affected Microsoft 365, Copilot, and Outlook access in 74 countries, according to Downdetector. But on Friday afternoon, the company said it wasn’t sure when the issue would be fully fixed.
“As infrastructure stabilizes, we’re still draining queued messages and rebalancing traffic, so customers may see improved sign-in/access while delivery and processing continue to catch up,” Microsoft posted in its now long-running X thread about the outage. “We do not have an ETA for full recovery yet. Service access can recover before mail flow fully normalizes.”
For some frustrated X users in the comments, that might not be enough. While many users are back in Outlook and Teams, the outage has now been affecting some for over 24 hours. One think tank told CNN it estimated the outage resulted in $7 billion in losses, due to many businesses and organizations being unable to access their everyday systems.
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On Friday morning, Microsoft shared an update on X that it was “seeing encouraging recovery progress” and that “a growing portion” of Microsoft 365 services was improving, noting in a follow-up post that it was seeing “broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific.”
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Downdetector reports have stayed low as of Friday midday at around 3,000.
What caused the outage?
Microsoft has not publicly identified the cause of the outage, but is maintaining it’s not security-related.
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Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s executive vice president of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, said on X late Thursday night, “I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.”
Microsoft reiterated that late Friday morning in an update to its X thread on the outage.
“We will continue to share more information as we have it, and for now we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity. Our teams are reviewing what happened and how we can prevent similar issues going forward,” Microsoft wrote.
According to CNN, Microsoft told Australia’s Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke that they “don’t believe they are dealing with a cyber attack.” During a press conference, Burke said Microsoft told him “they believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry.”
That refers to the great CrowdStrike meltdown of July 2024, in which a software issue disrupted operations at hospitals, airlines, and other major information hubs.
When the outage started
On Thursday morning, multiple people began reporting issues with Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, according to Downdetector. By 1 p.m. ET, the number of reported Outlook outages was nearly 83,000 but had fallen to just under 75,000 by 2:38 p.m. ET. Teams and Copilot reports started dropping significantly by Thursday evening, but many individuals were still reporting issues accessing systems well into Friday morning on X and Reddit. Even Microsoft’s status page was down until around 3 p.m. ET Thursday.
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It’s unclear how many people the outage affected, though Microsoft’s own numbers from January say Microsoft 365 “exceeds 450 million commercial paid seats,” illustrating the scale of the issue.
After “restarting affected servers” Thursday afternoon, Microsoft added said at 2:31 p.m. ET.
“We determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure,” the post said.
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