When will Outlook and Microsoft 365 be back up? Tech giant says it’s seeing ‘signs of stabilisation’

Charles Lamanna, the company's executive vice-president, gave the reassurance as millions of users around the world remained without access to emails and Teams.

Microsoft said it was now seeing “early signs of stabilisation” but had not yet been able to fully restore services.

The tech giant said it was working with “urgency ” to find a fix for the issue.

On its Microsoft 365 status page, the firm said: “We are seeing early signs of stabilisation, but service capacity has not yet returned to normal levels and health remains variable as traffic is carefully reintroduced.”

Downdetector had a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK

Downdetector

The disruption began late on Thursday and has hit governments, banks, police forces and health services among others.

A UK government spokesperson said: “We are working closely with Microsoft to assess any impact on government services, with robust contingency plans in place to minimise disruption.”

Hundreds of thousands of users worldwide have reported being unable to send and receive emails through Outlook since the problems began.

Teams has also been affected for many, while the company's Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services are also disrupted.

Police forces have said they cannot receive crime reports online and are urging people to call either 101 or 999 to make any urgent reports.

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in the UK at about 6.15pm on Thursday.

At its peak last night, more than 130,000 people were reporting Outlook issues in the US.

Users from 74 countries reported issues with Microsoft services in the space of an hour on Thursday, according to Downdetector.

Users are unable to access Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft services

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Problems were flagged from countries including the UK, US, India and New Zealand.

Reports about Outlook peaked at more than 2,000 times their normal level, the monitoring site added.

On Friday, users from about 60 countries, mainly in Europe and Asia, continued to record trouble.

Courts, charities and banks around the world have also reported Microsoft outages.

Microsoft had earlier said fixes to resolve the problem were not working “as expected”, but in its latest update on Microsoft 365 products, it gave some hope of a solution.

It said: “Our primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery.

“As part of this effort, we are extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues.”

The company had previously said it was seeing “positive results for server stability” from a patch put in place to fix the issue.

The group said it was “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident”.

It added: “We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation and we will share a full post-incident report with root cause and defence-in-depth actions after recovery is complete.”

Microsoft has not yet fully restored services following the outage, which has caused widespread disruption since late Thursday.