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Widespread outage hits Microsoft email, other apps
A widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms including Outlook on Thursday. LiveNOW's Andy Mac has more.
Microsoft says it has made progress restoring services following an outage that disrupted several parts of its Microsoft 365 infrastructure.
In an update Friday, the company said some key functions were recovering and network traffic was gradually being restored to portions of the affected infrastructure.
In this photo illustration, logo of Microsoft is displayed on November 10, 2026 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)
What we know:
As of 7 a.m. Friday, Microsoft reported improvements in mailbox access and the processing of delayed emails in North America. However, Outlook, Copilot and other workplace tools remained disrupted, with some users still experiencing intermittent issues.
The company also extended the delivery window for delayed messages, giving emails caught in the backlog until at least Saturday afternoon to reach recipients before being marked undeliverable.
What they're saying:
"Our focus is extending these recovery actions across remaining affected infrastructure while continuing stabilization and adding capacity to improve consistency," the company said.
The backstory:
The widespread outage began Thursday, leaving thousands of users unable to access email and cloud tools. Microsoft said the disruption involved an "elevated system load" after several servers went offline, overwhelming the remaining infrastructure.
During earlier recovery attempts, some servers initially appeared healthy after returning to service but became unresponsive again once they began receiving traffic.
What's next:
Microsoft has not yet announced a full restoration of affected services.
The Source: This story was written with information provided by Microsoft 365 Status social media account, Fox Business and previous reporting by Fox Local. This story was reported from Orlando.