Microsoft says email service nearly back to normal after global outage

Microsoft says its email service is “approaching normal levels” after a massive global outage left millions around the world without access to Outlook email, Teams meeting tools and other workplace tools, CNN reports.

The disruption began around noon ET on Thursday and stretched into a second day, with users struggling to reach their Exchange Online mailboxes.

Workplaces, government agencies and schools around the world were disrupted.

Scheduled meetings relying on Teams to connect with users’ calendars were likely hit.

“Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services,” the company said on its Service Health Status page.

Other affected services included SharePoint Online, Copilot, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Defender XDR.

Outage reports on Downdetector climbed to nearly 130,000 on Thursday afternoon.

Microsoft apologised and said there was no sign of a cyberattack. “This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents,” it said, blaming a problem from an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a recent network change.