Microsoft says email queues are approaching "normal levels," although Outlook failures persist

PulseThe company, which says it has not detected malicious activity, is restoring its systems in stages. Microsoft services, including email, begin to improve Mark Lennihan CommentsMicrosoft said it continues to see progress in the recovery of its services following the outage that began on Thursday, although it warned that users may still be unable to connect to several Microsoft 365 products, including Outlook, both in its web and desktop versions, and to many services that interact with email. In an update delivered around 11:00 a.m. Chile time this Friday, the company noted that it continues to "observe improvements in service availability, with mail queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels." Previously, the company had issued reports by region, and Asia-Pacific services were among the first to begin returning to normal. For the moment, at least in Chile, there are already reports that email services are starting to work, but intermittently. The connectivity problems began shortly before 3:00 p.m. Chile time on Thursday and affected Outlook and Teams, as well as other Microsoft 365 services, such as SharePoint and Copilot. Microsoft works to fix the outage in its services Dado Ruvic Numerous external services that connect to the company's products, such as the Outlook calendar, were also affected. Email and its associated tools were unavailable throughout the workday in Asia and until the morning in Europe. Microsoft said it has not detected malicious activity behind the outage, which it initially attributed to increased traffic in part of its infrastructure and to problems with a component responsible for processing server health status. We're rolling back a recent change to the Exchange Admin Center (EAC) to determine if this resolves the impact. While we're closely monitoring for improvement we're continuing to investigate the source of the issue. For more information, please see EX1500900 in the admin center…— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) October 12, 2026 The company's engineering teams have been taking affected systems offline to repair them and bringing them back online in stages. Their priority is to safeguard the emails delayed during the process and reduce the queues and accumulated messages, for which it extended to 48 hours the window in which those emails continue to be retried for delivery. In early trading on Wall Street, Microsoft shares were falling around 0.23%. However, Pulso could not verify whether the drop in shares was related to the technical problems with the services. Read also:Microsoft outage continues: company restores service in stages while businesses report problems Microsoft reports results above Wall Street expectations and shares riseMicrosoft offers voluntary exit to 60,000 employees, including vice presidentsMore about:MicrosoftOutlookNEWSLETTERPulso PMMonday to Friday, 12:30 PMThe most relevant news on markets, companies and business: timely information, context and content to make better decisions. By signing up you are accepting the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies of La Tercera.