Microsoft says fix is not going ‘as expected’ as thousands report ongoing issues
Outlook and Teams users face ongoing issues as Microsoft fix hits setback
Microsoft has issued a fresh update after a major global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and other services continued into Friday morning.
The technology giant has admitted that attempts to resolve the disruption are not progressing as expected, with users across the world reporting ongoing problems accessing emails and other essential services.
The outage, which began on Thursday, November 12, has affected Microsoft's popular Outlook email platform, Teams messaging service and its Microsoft 365 suite of applications.
The company's AI assistant Copilot has also been impacted.
According to outage monitoring website Downdetector, more than 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook were recorded in the United States at the height of the disruption on Thursday.
Thousands of additional reports were recorded for Microsoft 365 and Teams, with users experiencing difficulties sending and receiving emails, accessing their inboxes and connecting to online services.
In its latest update, Microsoft confirmed that measures introduced to restore services had not worked as expected.
"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," the company said.
It added that engineers were identifying alternative approaches to increase capacity and address ongoing problems with how traffic was being managed across its systems.
Microsoft previously identified issues involving servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks.
The disruption placed additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure, resulting in connectivity problems for users.
The company has been working to restore affected servers and redirect traffic in an effort to stabilise its services.
While some users have experienced a gradual recovery, the company has warned that restoring normal operations may take time.
Problems have been reported across several countries, including the United States, Australia, Japan and India.
Microsoft has indicated that the disruption does not appear to be the result of a cyberattack.
The company continues to monitor its systems and work towards restoring full service.