A widespread outage disrupted Microsoft's platforms, including Outlook, on Thursday, leaving thousands of users unable to access their email accounts and experiencing problems with other applications across the company's services.
The disruption, which began shortly after midday Eastern time and continued into the night, also affected numerous businesses and some government operations.
Downdetector, an outage-tracking website, recorded nearly 130,000 reports of problems accessing Outlook shortly after 1pm EST. Although reports later declined, many users said they were unable to send or receive emails or load their inboxes.
Thousands of others also reported difficulties accessing Microsoft's workplace messaging platform Teams, its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services.
Reports of disruptions continued across several parts of Asia on Friday morning.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said the outage had affected the government's IT infrastructure, adding that authorities were closely monitoring the situation.
Microsoft said in several social media updates that it was investigating the problems, noting that parts of its infrastructure were experiencing unusually high workloads, contributing to connectivity issues.
The company, headquartered in Redmond, Washington, found that several servers had failed automated health checks and that its backup measures were not immediately restoring them.
“We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Status account said in a post on X.
Earlier, the company announced that it had successfully restored Teams services in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity problems.