Microsoft said on Friday that its email services were being restored in parts of the Asia Pacific region, as it extended its email timeout to 48 hours to resolve an outage that affected systems globally on Thursday. The disruption affected Outlook, Teams and the Copilot AI service for millions of people, companies and governments around the world on Thursday, and the issue continued into Friday.
In its most recent update on Friday, the company said: “We’ve made additional progress towards service recovery, with recovery actions completed across portions of the affected infrastructure in the Asia Pacific region.” It added: “Traffic is being gradually restored and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. However, some users may continue to experience intermittent issues.”
Reducing email queues and backlogs “remains a priority, and the extended 48-hour email timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up,” the company said. The focus is now on extending the recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions.
“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” the company added.