Microsoft 365 Begins Gradual Recovery As Global Outage Enters Its 18th Hour

Microsoft has begun restoring its cloud-based productivity suite in phases following a widespread global disruption that left millions of users unable to access core workplace tools for more than 18 hours.

While the tech giant reports early signs of stabilization and steady progress in bringing affected infrastructure back online, a full recovery has not yet been confirmed.

Users across at least 74 countries continue to experience intermittent access issues, and Microsoft has not provided an exact timeline for complete service restoration.

The outage has heavily impacted applications tied to Exchange Online. Affected platforms include Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Copilot, OneDrive, Word, and Excel, stalling daily communications and workflows for businesses, schools, and individual users worldwide.

The disruption, which began around midday Eastern Time on Thursday, November 12, cut off millions of users from Exchange Online, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and the Copilot AI assistant. Outage-tracking platform Downdetector recorded nearly 140,000 user reports at the peak of the blackout. With more than 430 million people relying on Microsoft 365 worldwide, the true scale of the disruption is believed to be significantly larger.

In an update regarding the root cause, Microsoft indicated that the disruption stems from server configuration settings combined with higher-than-usual server stress. The company emphasized that there is no evidence to suggest the outage was caused by a cyberattack.

By Friday afternoon, Microsoft reported “encouraging recovery progress” and early signs of stabilization, particularly across North America and much of Europe, while noting that services in Japan remained comparatively stable. However, the company cautioned that intermittent issues persist and has yet to provide a definitive timeline for complete restoration. To prevent undelivered messages from bouncing back to senders during the backlog, Microsoft announced it has temporarily extended its email timeout window to 48 hours.

The prolonged blackout forced major institutions, financial markets and healthcare providers to scramble for offline workarounds. In Kenya, some banks, including Absa, notified customers of disruptions to their email services and directed them to seek assistance through the banks’ social media channels.

More to follow…