A global Microsoft 365 outage that began midday Thursday remained underway Friday morning, affecting email, cloud, and AI services, Ars Technica reported¹.

Microsoft said on a status page that it had no evidence of malicious activity and attributed the disruption to servers failing automated health checks and becoming unavailable, not to a surge in traffic¹.

The company said a portion of infrastructure experienced elevated load across multiple regions and that a core process on affected servers became overwhelmed, causing capacity loss¹.

Microsoft 365 Status said recovery actions were ongoing and that it had extended email timeout to 48 hours to help preserve delayed mail¹.

Ars, citing NBC News and other accounts, said businesses, hospitals, police departments, and schools were among those working around the outage, and that Japan's deputy chief cabinet secretary, Masanao Ozaki, said it disrupted government IT infrastructure there¹.

The same reporting described doctors unable to send some patient updates, people blocked from bank transfers that required verification codes, legal work interrupted at the Supreme Court of the Philippines, and a Colorado sheriff's office saying it was harder for people to post bond¹.

Microsoft has not said how many users were affected; Ars noted the company estimated in January that paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions exceeded 450 million¹.

Early mitigations did not restore access as expected, Microsoft said, and some servers that came back online became unresponsive again once they received traffic¹.

By Friday, Microsoft said it was seeing broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific, while warning that some users may still see intermittent access issues or delayed email¹.

DownDetector showed user reports peaking Thursday afternoon and dropping substantially by Friday morning, Ars said; Microsoft promised a post-incident report with root cause after mitigation is complete¹.