WASHINGTON (AFP) - Millions of people worldwide remain locked out of Microsoft’s Outlook email, Teams and other essential office tools after a massive outage disrupted businesses, governments and schools across 74 countries.
Microsoft acknowledged on Friday that its recovery efforts had achieved only “marginal success,” while users continued to report problems accessing its services.
The outage disrupted public services and businesses across several countries, forcing Japan’s government offices to switch to paper documents, delaying court proceedings in the Philippines and affecting Australian schools.
Microsoft attributed the failure to several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, forcing remaining systems to absorb additional traffic.
The company acknowledged that servers returned to service were becoming unresponsive again under renewed traffic.
Microsoft executive vice-president Charles Lamanna ruled out a cyberattack, stating that there was “no indication” the disruption resulted from malicious or cyber activity.
Although Microsoft later reported improved server stability and increased capacity following traffic-optimization measures, it continued working to restore affected systems.
The company has pledged to publish a detailed post-incident report explaining the root cause of the outage and the measures taken to prevent a recurrence once services are fully restored.
Microsoft 365 has more than 450 million corporate users and 95 million individual customers, while Teams alone has over 320 million users.
The disruption centered on services connected to Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email system, which also supports functions in Teams, SharePoint and Copilot.
Microsoft initially suggested the problem was limited to the Americas, before warning that Microsoft 365 connectivity could be affected in any region.
Microsoft said services not dependent on Exchange Online continued to function, while it worked to recover front-end servers and restore stability.
David Arroyo Guardeno, a senior researcher at Spain’s National Research Council, said abnormal network traffic pointed to a possible technical failure involving BGP and DNS, protocols used to route online traffic and locate domain names.