More than 16 hours after global outage, Microsoft still struggling to fix issue

FILE - The logo of Microsoft is seen outside its French headquarters in Issy-les-Moulineaux, outside Paris on May 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)The Microsoft 365 outage that has kept Outlook and Teams down for millions of users since around 11:30 pm IST on November 12 is slowly easing. More than 16 hours in, though, Microsoft is still not calling it fixed. In its latest Microsoft 365 status update, the company said recovery work has moved forward in phases across the affected infrastructure. Both its internal monitoring and customer reports, it said, point to "incremental improvement" in several services.The catch is in the second half of the same update. Microsoft said service health "remains variable" and that its systems have not fully returned to normal levels. Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 apps may work for some users and still stumble for others. The company has not shared a timeline for full restoration.Microsoft 365 outage recovery has moved from 'marginal success' to steady progressThe new update builds on the one Microsoft posted around 1 pm IST on November 13. That status note said the company was seeing "positive results" for server stability after applying a patch to a component that handles authentication and routing, essentially how users connect to its servers. Microsoft said then that it would expand the patch to more servers as regions came back online.The phased progress Microsoft now describes follows that patch. A little before the "positive results" note, Microsoft had reported only "marginal success" and said it was adding virtual machines to boost capacity. Hours before that, it admitted its fix was "not taking as expected".The trouble first surfaced in the Americas, where users reported they could not access their Exchange Online mailboxes. It soon spread across regions, including India. Microsoft said the problem was not a surge in traffic. Instead, a number of servers went offline unexpectedly, and the ones left running could not handle the load. Some servers that engineers revived went down again once traffic returned.Affected services include Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR. Consumer apps such as Outlook.com, OneDrive and OneNote have also been hit.Outlook and Teams may still be down for some users for a whileFor users, the phased recovery means things will not snap back for everyone at once. Some may find their Outlook inbox loading normally while a colleague still sees connection errors in Teams. Microsoft had earlier said users could see a gradual recovery as their apps reconnect to the service.In India, IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected, while OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with Microsoft connectors. Government offices in Japan switched to text messages, and the country's economy minister, Ryosei Akazawa, said the disruption had a "major impact". Australia's spy agency and federal police were among the organisations hit there, and several UK police forces asked people to call instead of reporting crimes online.Microsoft has maintained that the outage is not the result of a cyberattack. Company executive Charles Lamanna said there was "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity". Microsoft has promised a Post-Incident Report with the root cause once services are restored.IT admins can track the incident under MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or check the Microsoft 365 service status on status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not accessible.For now, Microsoft seems to be getting closer to a fix. The company has not said when services will be fully back, and until it does, users should expect the occasional hiccup in Outlook and Teams.