Microsoft's Outlook outage persists as initial fixes fail

A global outage has disrupted Microsoft's Outlook email service since Thursday, preventing tens of thousands of users from accessing their messages. Microsoft stated its initial fixes are not working as expected. The company confirmed the issue affects Microsoft 365 connections worldwide, with Downdetector reporting impacts across 74 countries and territories. Microsoft has paused deployments and is restarting servers, while AI assistants like Copilot, Claude, and ChatGPT have also been affected. Microsoft reported a limited recovery and is redirecting traffic to unaffected servers. A company executive confirmed on Friday there is no evidence of malicious activity or cyberattack behind the outage.