Microsoft said Friday it had addressed a network issue linked to a capacity upgrade, but restoration and delayed email monitoring continued for customers relying on its workplace services.
In its latest service-health notice, at 5 p.m. ET Friday, Microsoft described recovery as sustained but said it was reviewing the email backlog before declaring the incident resolved. It scheduled another update for 9:30 p.m. ET and said a post-incident report would follow its review.
Microsoft said the problem was tied to an earlier network capacity upgrade and became apparent after a more recent network change. At 1:05 p.m. ET Friday, it reported addressing the issue, while service restoration remained unfinished for some customers and regions.
The company said server availability fell unexpectedly, pushing more workload onto machines that remained available. Microsoft said this added load was not driven by a rise in overall traffic. Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR were among the services that could be affected.
A Microsoft status update at 9:54 p.m. ET Thursday said an earlier intervention was not delivering the expected improvement amid traffic-management imbalances. Engineers were examining other ways to add capacity. At 2:44 a.m. ET Friday, the company reported better stability and capacity after traffic-optimization measures and said it was expanding them across affected regions. By 5:28 a.m., service conditions remained uneven and capacity was still below baseline. Microsoft had extended its email timeout window to 48 hours while queued messages were processed.
Reuters reported that London’s Metropolitan Police had problems with some online crime-reporting tools, while some National Health Service (NHS) services switched to alternative IT systems or paper records. EconoTimes previously covered the outage’s effects on Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps.
