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Microsoft’s suite of workplace products — including its Outlook email service and Copilot AI assistant — remained severely disrupted Friday as a global outage dragged into its second day, hampering everyday operations for major businesses and millions of users worldwide.
Microsoft ruled out the possibility of a hack or other foul play being responsible for the outage, saying “we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.”
In morning service updates at 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. ET, Microsoft said it was seeing recovery progress across Europe and the Asia Pacific region, noting that Japan remained “comparatively more stable.”
Services in North America were also improving by 7 a.m., though the company cautioned that “some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue.”
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The disruption began Thursday afternoon and crippled Exchange Online, the underlying engine that powers Microsoft’s email infrastructure.
As of Friday morning, many Outlook users were still unable to access their inboxes or send and receive emails Friday morning as engineers worked to clear email queues and backlogs.
Microsoft said it extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages while services recover. Normally, if an email cannot be delivered within a standard window, mail servers give up and bounce the message back to the sender.
That gives emails caught in the backlog since the outage began Thursday afternoon until at least Saturday afternoon to reach recipients once systems recover.
Outlook, of course, is used for far more than email, with users reporting disruptions to key scheduling and productivity tools. This includes viewing calendars, sending meeting invites or editing existing events.
