Massive Microsoft outage crippling Outlook, Copilot AI, Teams stretches into day 2 as company says ‘no evidence of malicious activity’

The suite of products offered by Microsoft, such as Outlook email, Copilot AI, and others, remained severely hampered on Friday after a worldwide outage on Thursday. The outage has interfered with the operations of businesses worldwide.

Companies such as Workhorse Group delayed quarterly earnings announcements as a result, goverments were disrupted, police forces in Britain were unable to receive crime reports, Norway’s government said the system outage impacted “several ministries.”

Singapore’s Government Technology Agency said that emails for the government system were down. In Japan, the IT infrastructure of the government was impacted.

The company has ruled out that the outages have been a result of a hack and they “have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” the company said. “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.”

In a service update on Friday between 6 and 7 am EST, the company was seeing software services recovering in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region, and North America.

Although there has been a marked recovery, the company warned that "some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue.”

The company’s latest update said, “We’re seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific. Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation continues across remaining affected infrastructure.”

The outage from Microsoft was also accompanied by other tech companies reporting worldwide failures, with OpenAI and Anthropic also reporting issues.