Microsoft has yet to fully restore its Outlook email service after a global outage disrupted access to its workplace applications in 74 countries and territories.
The technology company said some regions had recorded partial improvements after efforts to stabilise its infrastructure, but the recovery had not been sustained.
The disruption, which started on Thursday, affected several Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot and SharePoint. Businesses, government agencies and schools were among those unable to access their emails and other workplace applications.
In an update posted on X on Friday, Microsoft said it was adjusting traffic protocols, redistributing network traffic and introducing strategic blocking measures to ease pressure on its infrastructure.
We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) November 12, 2026
The company, however, admitted that the interventions had not produced lasting improvements.
Microsoft said it had launched several recovery efforts to address the technical problems, restore affected infrastructure and reduce the impact on users. It is also working to recover its frontend servers while increasing system capacity through further traffic optimisation.
According to CNN, Downdetector recorded complaints from users in 74 countries and territories within about an hour of the disruption. Reports of Outlook problems reportedly exceeded 130,000 on Thursday.
The outage also disrupted operations in several countries. Government employees in Japan reportedly resorted to printing physical copies of documents, while the Philippines’ Supreme Court warned of delays in email responses and other transactions.
Some businesses and schools in Australia also experienced difficulties, including problems printing invoices and conducting online classes, according to the BBC.
Microsoft attributed the disruption to unexpected server failures, which redirected traffic to the remaining infrastructure and overwhelmed a core process on affected servers.
The company said it attempted to ease the pressure by pausing deployments, redirecting traffic and restarting servers. However, some servers became unresponsive again after receiving redirected traffic.
Microsoft said it had found no evidence of malicious activity behind the outage. It promised to publish a post-incident report outlining the root cause and corrective measures after restoring its services.
