Microsoft struggles to stabilize services as global outage enters second day

Engineers at Microsoft continue work to fully restore operations following a major technical disruption that affected Outlook, Teams, and Copilot across 74 countries. The outage began on Thursday evening, triggering nearly 130,000 incident reports globally as core software applications froze.

Microsoft confirmed the disruption stemmed from an internal process managing secure connections becoming overwhelmed under heavy traffic load, explicitly ruling out a cyberattack. Recovery actions are prioritising emergency, public safety, and government infrastructure. Although initial measures—including restarting systems and reverting recent network adjustments—showed promise, technical teams reported that several servers froze again once live traffic resumed, necessitating continued intervention.

Sources: BBC News, Cyprus Mail, STV News, The Guardian, The Herald