Microsoft services still not fully restored on second day of global outage, though email queues are clearing

More than 24 hours after a mass outage disrupted communications worldwide, Microsoft said on Friday that its popular email and other services were improving but not fully restored. The disruption, caused by server failures, stretched into a second day and disrupted governments, businesses and individuals.

The outage began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday and affected users in 74 countries. Microsoft said on Friday that there was no indication of a cyberattack or malicious activity.

In a statement the company said: 'We're seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.' Microsoft reported that 'email queues [are] significantly reduced and approaching normal levels'.

The outage affected Microsoft 365 services used by global businesses, institutions and individuals, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, its artificial intelligence tool. It was one of the longest in Microsoft's history and the second disruption to its services this year.

Microsoft has not said how many people were affected. In January the company announced it had more than 450 million Microsoft 365 commercial subscribers. The United States-based tech giant is valued at more than $3.8 trillion.

By midday GMT on Friday, Microsoft reported that email delivery and 365 services were improving across Europe, North America and the Asia Pacific, but acknowledged that some services remained spotty.

The impact spread across sectors. A trader told the Reuters news agency that foreign banks and financial institutions in Taiwan were hit especially hard, as their data is emailed to overseas headquarters through Microsoft's systems. Fax machines were used in Taipei, while European exchange operator Euronext told companies to phone in their trades.

Norway's parliament and several ministries lost access to email, while 80 to 90 Danish municipalities were reportedly affected. Rail operators in Germany, the United Kingdom and Canada said the outage impacted timetables and emailed tickets, and the UK's National Health Service pivoted to using paper records.

In the United States, the House of Representatives and local governments were affected, Reuters reported. The US Department of Defense, which relies heavily on Microsoft's services, did not comment on whether it was affected. The Pentagon was slated to upgrade its Microsoft infrastructure starting in June in a $9.7bn deal that included access to Microsoft 365.

Walter Pasquarelli, a strategy adviser to governments on AI and an affiliated researcher at the University of Cambridge, said: 'What we do know so far is that this is first and foremost a communication risk. It's not just workers across businesses who cannot get access to it, but there's lots of government services and lots of government infrastructure that actually relies on that.'

The server failures did not appear to shake Wall Street's confidence in Microsoft. Its stock was mostly flat in US market trading on Friday as the tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell slightly, led by the embattled AI company Nvidia. Microsoft said it would review the incident along with measures to prevent future disruptions.