Microsoft is working to restore services for millions of users globally after a major outage impacted Exchange Online, with the tech giant confirming that some customers “continue to experience intermittent issues.”
In a service status update published today, the company said it was making “additional progress” towards fixing the global disruption.
The outage, which has affected a wide suite of Microsoft 365 services including Teams, Planner, and SharePoint Online, left many unable to load their mailbox or access work files. The company noted that elements of services which do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional.
Discussing the current status of the recovery efforts, the company stated that they were seeing improvements.
“We’ve made additional progress toward service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region,” Microsoft said.
“Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues.”
The technology firm also stressed that it is trying to maintain consistency across its platforms.
“Our focus is now on extending these recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions, while continuing stabilization efforts and adding supporting capacity to improve service consistency,” Microsoft continued.
“Reducing email queues and backlogs remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.”
Addressing potential security concerns regarding the widespread disruption, the software developer confirmed that a full investigation will take place.
“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” Microsoft clarified.
“We will continue to treat this with urgency until full mitigation, and we will share a full Post-Incident Report with root cause and defense-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.”
Microsoft 365 is a critical piece of infrastructure for businesses and educational institutions worldwide. The platform bundles essential enterprise applications, including Outlook, Word, Excel, and Teams, into one cohesive cloud environment.
Because these core services are heavily integrated, any disruption to back-end infrastructure like Exchange Online can quickly paralyse daily operations for corporate environments.
While local files and standard Teams channels have remained unaffected for most users during this incident, the inability to schedule meetings, view calendars, or reliably send emails underscores the modern workplace’s heavy reliance on uninterrupted cloud services.