Microsoft has reported gradual improvements in its efforts to restore services following a widespread global outage that disrupted Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams and other products for more than 12 hours, affecting millions of users across multiple regions.
The technology giant said recovery efforts were beginning to produce positive results after engineers applied software patches, restarted affected infrastructure and introduced measures to stabilise network traffic.
In an update published on its Service Health Status page early Friday, Microsoft said it had observed “marginal success” following initial recovery measures.
The company said its technical teams were continuing to monitor service activity across affected regions, assess server performance and identify ways to increase system capacity.
In a subsequent update, Microsoft reported further progress, saying its latest traffic optimisation measures had delivered “positive results for service stability and increased capacity.”
“Recovery efforts are ongoing across impacted infrastructure. We are seeing early signs of stabilization, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced,” the company stated.
The improvements followed several unsuccessful recovery attempts that had prolonged the disruption and left users struggling to access essential communication and productivity services.
Microsoft previously identified unexpectedly unavailable servers as a major factor behind the outage, explaining that the loss of server capacity had placed additional pressure on the remaining operational infrastructure.
The disruption affected Exchange Online mailboxes and prevented users in several regions from reliably accessing Outlook email services, Microsoft 365 applications and the Teams collaboration platform.
According to outage-monitoring website Downdetector, reports from users in the United States exceeded 97,000 for Outlook, 38,000 for Microsoft 365 and 4,500 for Teams during the disruption.
The figures reflected widespread difficulties experienced by individuals and organisations relying on Microsoft’s cloud-based services for communication, remote collaboration and daily business operations.
Microsoft said it had found no indication of malicious activity associated with the incident, although engineers were continuing to investigate the underlying technical issues.
The company emphasised that restoring normal service remained a priority and that infrastructure recovery would continue until stability and capacity returned to expected levels.
Microsoft also pledged to publish a detailed post-incident report once the disruption had been fully resolved.
The report is expected to explain the root cause of the outage, assess the effectiveness of the recovery response and outline measures intended to improve the resilience of Microsoft’s infrastructure against similar incidents.
Although the latest updates indicate progress, the company has not yet confirmed a complete restoration of services or provided a definitive timeline for full recovery.