Update: Microsoft outage hits a second day, rules out a hack and gives stuck email 48 hours

The Microsoft outage that began Thursday afternoon rolled into a second day on Friday, with service returning for some users and not others. This is an update to our Thursday report, and it covers only what has changed.

What is new

• No hack, according to Microsoft. The company said it has "no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident," Fox Business reported. The New York Times said Microsoft appeared to rule out a cyberattack but did not specify a cause. Fox said no root cause has been determined.
• The stated mechanism has not changed. The BBC reported Microsoft attributes the problem to "elevated load": a large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which pushed extra traffic onto the ones still running.
• Recovery is uneven. Fox reported that Microsoft's 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. ET updates showed recovery progress, with a warning that some users may still see intermittent problems. The Times said that by 9 a.m. ET Microsoft described service as being restored and in some cases "approaching normal levels," and that core functions of Teams and Copilot were online by early Friday.
• Email timeout stretched to 48 hours. Fox reported that Microsoft extended its email timeout window to 48 hours so delayed messages are not bounced back. By Fox's reading, mail stuck since Thursday afternoon has until at least Saturday afternoon to arrive.

The number behind the number

Thursday's headline figure was more than 140,000 Downdetector reports, which the BBC notes understates the damage because the site relies on self-reporting. The scale that matters is on the Microsoft side: the Times, citing Microsoft, said the company had 450 million paid Microsoft 365 subscriptions as of January. The BBC reported that OpenAI and Anthropic also saw problems, that courts, schools, GP surgeries and police forces in several countries were affected, and that the outage had run for more than 20 hours at the time of its report.

Who it actually hits now

• A contractor or distributor who sent quotes or change orders Thursday. Replies may be sitting in a queue. The 48-hour window means a bounce is less likely than it was, so a missing reply is not proof the customer ignored you.
• A professional-services firm that runs client calls on Teams. Core Teams functions were reported back online Friday morning, but the Times and Fox both describe recovery as uneven. Confirm the call link works before the meeting starts.
• An owner who sends invoices by email. Invoices sent Thursday may land late, which can push the date a customer pays.

What to do

• Do not blast duplicates. With a 48-hour window, messages may still arrive, and a resend adds a second copy for the customer to sort out.
• For anything with a deadline, send a short text or call, then follow up by email once your own mailbox is behaving normally.
• Keep a written log of when your mail and calls stopped working. If your Microsoft agreement or your own customer contracts address downtime, you will want the hours.
• Do not assume this was an attack and change passwords on that basis. Microsoft says it has no evidence of one, and that is the only position on record so far.

The stock

Microsoft shares were trading near $522 at 9:51 a.m. ET Friday, down about 0.2% on the session, per Nasdaq quote data. That leaves the stock roughly 6.1% below its Nov. 4 closing peak on Yahoo Finance data. We have not seen any reporting that ties a price move to the outage.

Sources: Fox Business; BBC News; The New York Times; Microsoft service updates as quoted by those outlets; Nasdaq and Yahoo Finance price data. We will update this story if Microsoft names a root cause. This is market information, not investment advice.