Microsoft Says Email Backlog ‘Approaching Normal’ After Outage Paralyzes Outlook

Microsoft says that more than a hundred million users may finally be able to use their emails after a nearly day-long outage.

The tech giant announced “sustained improvements” in recovery efforts after an outage blocked more than 130,000 Outlook users from accessing their inboxes and disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services, according to the company’s service status page. The company found “no evidence of malicious activity” and plans to release an incident report on the cause of the outage.

While there is no evidence of a cyberattack or malicious activity, this is the fourth major outage the company has faced in 2026.

Microsoft 365 services are still facing “service degradation” at the time of reporting, according to the company’s Service Health Status page.

“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,” the company said in a Microsoft 365 Status X post Friday morning. “Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs while we validate service consistency across connection methods.”

The company said users could still face “intermittent access issues” and the situation was progressively improving.

“We’re continuing to see improvements in service availability, with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels,” the company said in a follow-up X post. “We’ve implemented additional mitigation measures, are restoring remaining affected infrastructure, and are investigating residual service issues while closely monitoring service health and validating recovery across affected connection methods.”

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners. We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously,” Microsoft wrote in an X post at 11:40 a.m. on Friday. “We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.”

“This was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents. The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change,” the post added. “We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions. Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.”

The outage affected 74 countries and territories within an hour, and the incident began at approximately 11:17 a.m. ET Thursday, Downdetector said in an X post.

Microsoft has also faced major Microsoft 365 outages in January, July and August.

Top American AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, both state “elevated errors affecting the Microsoft 365 connector” on their status pages.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 products, according to Microsoft’s fiscal 2025 third-quarter earnings call.