Microsoft fails to recover normality of its services after a global drop of more than 12 hours

Microsoft reported early this Friday that it is not being able to recover from the global drop in its services. The executive vice president of Copilot at Microsoft, Charles Lamanna, has ruled out that the incident was caused by a cyber attack, as the company tries to regain normality in its operations this Friday. The affected products are Outlook email, the Teams environment, SharePoint Online, the Copilot artificial intelligence chatbot, OneDrive and OneNote, among others.

“For now, I can confirm that there are no indications that this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Lamanna, who holds the position of vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platforms at Microsoft, considered the largest software company in the world, wrote in X. In its latest update, the company assures that it is beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel: "We are seeing positive results in service stability and increased capacity thanks to our latest traffic optimization actions. We are implementing these actions more broadly in the affected regions as we seek to achieve a persistent recovery."

According to the company's own data, the affected Microsoft365 service has more than 450 million corporate users and 95 million individual customers. The Teams program, for video conferencing and other functionalities for work environments, has more than 320 million users.

In its previous updates on its official X social network account, the company explained that it continues to work to stabilize the servers and improve traffic flow. Although it assures that a partial recovery is being achieved in the regions where it has applied these measures, the company admits that “they are not leading to a sustained recovery” and that it is studying what other actions it can take to stabilize its infrastructure.

According to the company, the problem was not an increase in traffic due to increased user activity or other reasons, but because several servers had become unavailable unexpectedly, and their work fell on those that remained, in a domino effect that ended up saturating the systems. There is still no definitive analysis of the cause, but the only thing that seems clear is that the problem affects services "that interact with Exchange Online and email." That is why it dragged Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, associated with email, while those that do not depend on Exchange continue to work.

The company assures that it keeps “multiple lines of work” open to reduce the impact and return stability to parts of the infrastructure. In its most recent message, Microsoft states that it continues to try to recover its frontend servers while applying new traffic optimization measures to gain stability and capacity. Microsoft has not given an estimated time for the full fix.

Microsoft confirmed on Thursday afternoon in Spain that its 365 platform services have suffered a global drop. The company has confirmed on the social network The company has explained that the problems affect several connection methods.

The first notice stated that the problem was limited to America, but the company later confirmed that the failure may affect the connectivity of Microsoft 365 services for users "in any region." Microsoft notes that some of its infrastructure is under heavy load in many countries, which likely contributes to connection errors.