Microsoft services that went down amid a widespread outage are gradually coming back online, the company said. An issue that impacted Microsoft 365 on Thursday afternoon took out services such as Outlook, Teams and Copilot 365, disrupting businesses and organizations around the world.

The company toiled overnight to restore service. Around 10PM ET on Thursday, it said some attempts to "improve serviceability" didn't work as hoped. By 2:45AM the following morning, though, it was "seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of our latest traffic optimization actions."

Around 8:30AM, the company reported "continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific." In an update 45 minutes later, Microsoft said that while some people might be experiencing delayed email deliveries in Outlook or spotty connectivity, it was seeing "sustained improvements" in availability of affected services.

"We're seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure," the company said in an update at 10:39AM. "We know our customers rely on our services to get important work done every day, and regret the impact these outages had on those who depend on us."

The company later said it was "deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused you and your business." The outage was not the result of a cyberattack or AI agents causing havoc. "The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change," according to Microsoft, which has "addressed the underlying issue."

It added that it was "seeing broad recovery and stability across our services," which it restored gradually. A high level of demand meant it needed to validate system stability at each stage of the process. "While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration," it said. "We will provide a full post-incident report once our review is complete."

The day-long outage underscored how important it is for people and organizations to have redundancies in place. It had a widespread impact across the globe, affecting calls to emergency services, governments, the House of Representatives, court systems, schools and other organizations.

The UK's National Pharmacy Association said the email issues could cause "delays to some prescriptions." In Japan, where the majority of businesses and institutions are said to use Microsoft services, some companies seemingly went back to using fax machines on a temporary basis.

Given that the outage prevented them from doing their jobs properly, some workers in Australia and the UK used it as an excuse to clock off early on Friday and go to the pub. However, the inevitable return to normality weighed on some people's minds. "I thought it was heaven because I wasn't getting any emails at all, but this is just a Microsoft outage, so I'm actually just waiting in line at the gates of hell," the quoted one person as saying.

Added Microsoft's apology and explanation of what caused the outage.