Technology|Microsoft’s Global Outage and Fixes: What We Know

Microsoft is reporting widespread improvements to its services after a global outage took them offline on Thursday, disrupting communications and work at schools, government agencies and offices around the world. The company, headquartered in Redmond, Wash., said on Friday that it was seeing “encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure.”

“We remain focused on addressing residual impact and ensuring reliable service restoration,” the company added.

Here’s what to know as of Friday afternoon.

What happened?

Outages started disrupting Microsoft tools and apps around noon Eastern time on Thursday and quickly spread to more than 70 countries and territories, affecting millions of users, according to Downdetector, an outage-tracking site.

Some of Microsoft’s most popular products, including the email manager Outlook, the workplace messaging and video calling app Teams and the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot, stopped working.

Was this a cyberattack?

Microsoft said in a statement on Friday that “for now, we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.” It added that the problem was “a technical issue not related to cyber or A.I.” agents.

So why were Microsoft’s systems not working?

The company has yet to provide a clear answer, although it has promised to make public a full report that identifies the “root cause” of the outage.