Microsoft reported broader service recovery across North America and Europe on Friday, alongside signs of improvement in the Asia-Pacific region, as it worked to restore operations following a global outage that disrupted access to Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams and other products for more than 12 hours.

In a statement, Microsoft reported “continued recovery progress across affected regions,” citing broader improvements in North America, sustained recovery across much of Europe and “encouraging recovery signals” in the Asia-Pacific region.

The company cautioned that the disruption had yet to be fully resolved, warning that some users could still experience “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery” as efforts continued to restore the remaining affected infrastructure.

“Our focus remains on stabilizing recovered infrastructure, completing mitigation in remaining impacted areas, and reducing delayed email queues and backlogs,” Microsoft 365 Status said.

Microsoft added that it was assessing service consistency across different connection methods, indicating that recovery efforts remained underway even in regions where improvements had already been reported.

The latest assessment follows a series of updates in which Microsoft reported “additional progress toward recovery” and said traffic was “being gradually restored.” The company had also noted improvements in mailbox access and delayed email processing, while warning that intermittent problems could persist.

In an earlier update, Microsoft said email delivery performance was improving across an increasing portion of its infrastructure, adding that recovery efforts remained focused on environments still affected by the disruption.

“Some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue,” the company said, identifying the reduction of email queues and backlogs as a priority.

Microsoft also said an extended 48-hour email timeout window would remain in place to help protect delayed messages while delivery caught up.

Earlier in its recovery efforts, the company reported “marginal success” after applying patches and rebooting infrastructure.

On its Service Health Status page, Microsoft said it was monitoring activity across regions, assessing server performance and evaluating measures to improve system capacity.

The company later reported that traffic optimization measures had delivered “positive results for service stability and increased capacity.”

The developments offered further signs of progress after earlier recovery attempts failed to produce the expected results, leaving users in multiple regions struggling to access essential workplace and communication tools.

Microsoft had previously identified unexpectedly unavailable servers as the main factor behind the disruption, which placed additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure.

The outage affected Exchange Online mailboxes and disrupted access to Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams across multiple regions.

Microsoft said it had “no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident” and pledged to continue treating the disruption as a priority until full mitigation.

The company said it would publish a comprehensive post-incident report once mitigation is complete, outlining the root cause and the measures it plans to take to strengthen infrastructure resilience. (AA)