Microsoft reported progress Friday in restoring its Microsoft 365 services after a global outage entered its second day, disrupting communications and operations across businesses, government agencies and other organizations worldwide. The disruption affected Outlook, Teams and Copilot, leaving users unable to access email and other essential workplace tools.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said service availability and email delivery were improving across an expanding portion of its affected infrastructure. Microsoft also reported broader recovery in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe and encouraging signs in the Asia-Pacific region. Some customers began reporting that their email services had returned.

However, the company warned that intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery could continue as engineers worked to restore the remaining affected systems. Microsoft said it was prioritizing the reduction of email backlogs while taking a measured approach to identifying and repairing the infrastructure responsible for the disruption.

The company first flagged the incident Thursday, and its updates indicated that engineers had encountered difficulties restoring services. In one post, Microsoft acknowledged that changes intended to address the problem were "not taking as expected." By Friday morning, the company reported early stabilization, increased capacity, and incremental improvements across several services.

Microsoft said it had not found evidence that malicious activity caused the outage and pledged to treat the incident with urgency until services were fully restored. The total number of affected users remains unclear, although the company reported in January that it had more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions.

The outage extended beyond routine business communications, affecting public services and essential operations in several countries. In Manchester, England, Judge Maurice Greene halted a trial and sent jurors home because of delays, warning that the disruption demonstrated the risks of relying heavily on technology in court proceedings.

British police forces said they could not receive crime reports through their online systems and urged the public to call emergency responders to report urgent incidents. The National Pharmacy Association also warned that patients could experience prescription delays because the outage affected email systems used by the National Health Service.

The British government said it was working with Microsoft to assess the effects on public services, adding that contingency plans were in place. In Norway, several government ministries lost access to email, with officials saying they had not received an indication of when the problem would be resolved.

Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had compared the disruption to the 2024 CrowdStrike outage, which was caused by a faulty software update and disrupted airlines, hospitals, banks and retailers. Burke said he had spoken with Microsoft's senior executive in Australia and the government's national cybersecurity coordinator. He told reporters that Microsoft did not believe the current incident was a cyberattack but suspected an update-related problem similar to the earlier disruption.

Businesses and financial institutions also reported problems. Danny Lau, who operates an aluminum company in Hong Kong, said his firm could not receive updates from U.S. customers through Outlook, raising concerns about potential production delays. Some banks in the financial hub also experienced disruptions to portions of their operations.

Air India said its flight operations remained unaffected but temporarily redirected its email services to ensure customer inquiries continued reaching the airline. India's IndiGo reported disruptions to its email support system, although its other customer service channels and flight operations remained operational.

Singapore's Government Technology Agency said government email services were down and that it was working with Microsoft to resolve the issue. The Philippines' Supreme Court reported that some operations, including email responses, had been affected. Japanese officials also said government IT infrastructure was experiencing problems and that alternative communications methods, including telephone services, had been secured.

The disruption reached U.S. corporate operations as well. Industrial technology company Workhorse Group postponed a quarterly earnings conference call because of the outage.

The incident also affected companies developing and providing Super Intelligence tools. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems connecting with Microsoft 365 services, highlighting how disruptions to widely used workplace software can extend to other technology platforms that depend on integrations with Microsoft's systems.