Here’s what to know about the Microsoft outages — and what may have caused them

Microsoft said it is seeing progress in North America as the tech giant works to resolve one of the biggest service outages in recent history — but there is still little known about the source of the problems.

The software giant said Friday morning is slowly getting back online, and that it was “not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident” which has disrupted important communications for millions of workers, government officials and hospitals and individual customers.

“We’re continuing to see improvements in service availability, with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels,” the company said at 9:15 am ET the start of the work day for millions of people on the east coast.

As the outage entered its second day — disrupting a wide range of Microsoft 365 services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot — some users could still have “intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as mitigation progresses across the remaining affected infrastructure,” Microsoft said.

On a separate status page, the company reported “broader improvements” in North America and “sustained improvements across much of Europe,” as well as “encouraging recovery signals” in the Asia-Pacific region.

The total number of people affected is not clear, but the company said in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.

Microsoft suggested it may have been a case of system overload.

“Microsoft has identified that the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” wrote the company’s independent adviser Darren Bruce on a live blog addressing user complaints.

Ciaran Martin, the former head of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre, told NBC News that the outage was monumental — “looks like being one of the biggest outages of all time,” Martin said

The timing of the outage comes at a difficult time for the company. The tech giant recently offered buyouts to over a quarter of its workforce — 60,000 employees — as the software company looked to cut costs and restructure its staff to meet the AI moment.

People on social media were quick to point to the staff reductions as a possible cause of the outages.

Employees in the US, Canada, the UK, and India on Monday received a memo saying the voluntary exit offers “are a few of the ways we’re trying to meet different business needs while continuing to create opportunities for our own people to grow and contribute.”