Follow Us on Google
Microsoft is still battling to restore its Outlook email service following a global outage that disrupted access to its workplace applications across 74 countries and territories.
The technology company said its efforts to stabilise its infrastructure had resulted in partial recovery in some regions, but it had yet to achieve sustained improvements.
In an update shared on X on Friday, Microsoft said it was adjusting traffic protocols, redistributing network traffic and introducing targeted restrictions as part of efforts to restore normal services.
The company stated, “We’re continuing our efforts to improve service stability and traffic flow. This includes adjusting traffic protocols, redistributing traffic, and applying strategic traffic blocking measures,”
It added, “We’re observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren’t resulting in sustained recovery, so we’re reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability,”
The disruption, which started on November 12, has affected businesses, government institutions and schools, leaving users unable to access emails and other Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft’s investigation has focused on reports that users in the Americas were unable to access their Exchange Online mailboxes through different connection methods. The incident was listed on the Microsoft 365 admin centre under reference number EX1550543.
Other News
Other affected services include Microsoft Teams, Copilot and SharePoint, adding to the difficulties faced by organisations that depend on the company’s applications for daily operations.
Reports from Downdetector indicated that complaints came from 74 countries and territories within about an hour of the disruption. Outlook-related reports reportedly exceeded 130,000 at the peak on Thursday.
The outage has also affected operations in several countries. Government employees in Japan reportedly resorted to using physical documents, while the Philippines Supreme Court warned of possible delays involving emails and transactions.
In Australia, businesses and schools also experienced difficulties, including disruptions to invoice processing and online classes.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to unexpected unavailability of some servers, which forced the company to redirect traffic to its remaining infrastructure. The shift reportedly placed additional pressure on core systems, with some servers becoming unresponsive following the traffic redistribution.
The company said it had paused deployments, redirected traffic and restarted affected servers as part of its recovery efforts. It is also working to restore frontend servers, optimise traffic flow and increase infrastructure capacity.
Microsoft said it had found no evidence of malicious activity linked to the incident and promised to publish a post-incident report after the disruption is resolved.
