Microsoft's email and work apps were still failing worldwide on Friday, more than 16 hours after the outage began, as servers it restarted overnight kept crashing once traffic returned.
Key Takeaways
- Microsoft says a core process on its email servers is getting overwhelmed, cutting capacity across regions
- Servers it brought back overnight failed again as soon as they received traffic
- Microsoft has extended the email timeout to 48 hours to help preserve delayed mail
- Police Scotland and Dorset Police told the public to call 101 or 999 because online forms are down
Microsoft's status account first flagged problems opening Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas at 17:54 UTC on Thursday, and 13 minutes later said users in any region could be hit. Its latest update, at 10:28 UTC on Friday, said recovery is "progressing in phases" but capacity "has not yet fully returned to baseline."
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What Went Wrong
Microsoft said the strain was not caused by a rise in traffic. Instead, a number of servers became "unexpectedly unavailable," leaving the rest to carry the load. It later found that a core process on the affected servers was becoming overwhelmed, causing capacity loss.
The company paused all deployments, moved traffic to other infrastructure and restarted servers. It said it had found no recent change linked to the start of the problem, though it looked at reverting a small number of recent configuration updates.
| Time (UTC) | What Microsoft said |
|---|---|
| Thu 17:54 | Users in the Americas can't reach their mailboxes |
| Thu 18:07 | Users in any region may be affected |
| Thu 19:12 | All deployments paused, servers being restarted |
| Thu 22:09 | Fixes so far have not brought the expected relief |
| Fri 00:06 | Restored servers go unresponsive again under traffic |
| Fri 03:13 | Capacity changes are not working as expected |
| Fri 07:44 | Positive results from new traffic changes |
| Fri 09:24 | Early stabilization, email timeout extended to 48 hours |
Police And Schools Switch To Phones
Police Scotland said its online forms, including its ContactUs service, were affected and that it could not receive any emails. Dorset Police said it could not receive online form submissions and asked people with time-critical reports to dial 101, and anyone facing a crime in progress or a threat to life to call 999.
Schools in England asked parents to phone in instead. Hammersmith Academy and Mark Hall Academy told families that email was down and asked them to use the phone lines only for absences and urgent matters.
When Will It Be Fixed
Microsoft has not given a time for full recovery. Its latest updates point to "incremental improvement in several workloads," but it says service health "remains variable." It has extended the email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed mail while it clears the backlog.
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Originally published on Fathom News.
