Microsoft restores services after 12-hour global outage hits Outlook, Teams

Microsoft reported progress restoring services after a global outage lasting over 12 hours disrupted Outlook, Microsoft 365, and Teams, with recovery efforts ongoing but capacity not yet normal. The company saw "marginal success" after applying patches and rebooting infrastructure, later noting traffic optimisation delivered "positive results for service stability." The outage stemmed from unexpectedly unavailable servers, affecting Exchange Online mailboxes across multiple regions. Downdetector recorded over 97,000 US outage reports for Outlook, 38,000 for Microsoft 365, and 4,500 for Teams. Microsoft found no malicious activity linked to the incident and pledged a detailed post-incident report on root cause and resilience improvements.