A major Microsoft outage has impacted schools, healthcare systems, businesses, courts and governments around the world.

Services including Teams, Outlook and AI software Copilot, are being restored almost 24 hours since issues first surfaced.

Microsoft said the outage was not a cyber-security incident and was caused by a technical issue. It has apologised for the disruption.

Here’s what we know about the services affected and what went wrong.

Some Microsoft 365 services have been affected by “connectivity problems” with problems reported in at least 74 countries.

From late on Thursday, customers reported varying levels of access – many were unable to send or receive emails, view certain files or details on their calendar apps.

But some users were able to use Teams, messaging and online meeting functions without issues.

As of Friday afternoon, Microsoft said it had seen “encouraging recovery progress” in Europe and improvement in North America.

The company added that it was focused on “addressing the remaining areas of disruption” but warned “some users may still experience intermittent issues”.

In a later statement, the company said it was continuing to see improvements “with email queues significantly reduced and approaching normal levels”.

The company attributed the ongoing outage to an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade.

“We have addressed the underlying issue and continue to restore service to remaining customers and regions,” it said on Friday.

Although services are beginning to resume, Microsoft has warned of continued “intermittent access issues”, meaning some users will still struggle to load their inboxes and could experience “delayed email delivery”.

In other words, it is not quite safe to assume every email you send is going to arrive in its intended recipient’s inbox right away.

Earlier, Microsoft said it would be extending the “timeout window” to 48 hours “to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up”.

The email timeout window refers to the amount of time Outlook will wait to receive an email.

When they do show up, the timestamp will be when they were delivered rather than when they were sent.

Although email service Outlook appears to be resuming, the outage has so far lasted for more than 20 hours – in outage terms that is considered a long time.

Prof James Ferryman from the University of Reading’s department of computer science said the details the company has disclosed provide some clues.

“What Microsoft has told us is that the part of its servers that sets up secure connections is getting swamped, and once that happens the server just stops answering,” he said.

“The trouble is that this kind of failure snowballs.

“One server falls over, its work gets passed to the next one, and meanwhile huge numbers of phones and laptops keep trying to get back in.

“You can’t just turn it all back on at once. You have to bring it back bit by bit.”

The challenge is therefore not just fixing the fault, but managing the huge surge of devices trying to reconnect once services start coming back online.

Gergely Orosz, a former leading software engineer at several major tech companies including Skype and Uber, said this could be the “most disruptive” business email outage “of all time”.

He said it was still difficult to know just how many people have been affected by the disruption, but added he “cannot recall” an outage over business email ever taking this long to return to normal.

Australian cyber-security expert Troy Hunt told the BBC the outage could have far-reaching consequences.

“Microsoft is a massive part of the internet backbone and reminds us how critical email still is.

“Not only does this outage affect many people’s ability to work but also things like the ability to communicate about appointments, purchase things that need verification, create or access accounts and services,” he said.

In a statement, Microsoft said it was “deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners.

“We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously. We are seeing broad recovery and stability across our services.”

More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps according to Microsoft’s website. The full scale of the outage has not been confirmed.

Microsoft 365 is used by companies worldwide and is expected to have a knock-on effect to other services.

Tech giants OpenAI and Anthropic both earlier reported problems as a result of the outage.

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said it was investigating an issue affecting its connections to Microsoft’s services, which had caused some tools to not work as expected.

From city governments in the US to Australian spy agencies, disruption across the globe has been widespread.

Courts from Los Angeles to Texas earlier warned that communications might be delayed.

In Canada, the public broadcaster CBC reported that a healthcare network running several hospitals in Toronto was experiencing email issues, but that patient care was not affected.

The government of Japan also said its shared IT platform had been disrupted.

Across the UK, GP surgeries, pharmacies, police and schools have been affected by the outage.

Some GP surgeries had urged patients not to submit messages via their website while police forces were also earlier asking the public to call if they want to make a report.

Additional reporting by Henry Moore

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The first public words from the prime minister after the American midterm elections were instantly revealing about contemporary international politics and diplomacy.

“Well, President Trump has accepted the results,” Andy Burnham said.

It is not an observation British leaders have frequently had to make about recent American presidents – that they are not disputing the result of elections in their own country. But what would previously have been taken for granted no longer can be.

Burnham remains in the foothills of establishing a relationship with the president – so far it has amounted to a handful of phone calls and one face-to-face meeting at the United Nations in New York in September.

As he continues to attempt to build a rapport with Donald Trump, he will be doing so with a president in a wildly different political situation than when Sir Keir Starmer was trying to build bridges with him.

No longer is this a story of an extraordinary comeback, but of a midterm president seemingly punished for the consequences of a foreign war the type of which he had originally promised to avoid.

And it is noticeable that the British government’s public reaction is grounded too in the consequences of the war with Iran: the cost of living.

“I feel the world has an opportunity now to unite around the issue that is affecting us all and that’s the cost of living,” the prime minister said.

“But I can’t get people’s cost of living pressures down until the conflict in the Middle East is resolved, the conflict between in Ukraine started by Russia.”

Within government the Iran war and its consequences, particularly on energy prices, is widely seen as the biggest individual contributor among the many factors currently driving up the cost of living.

And, bluntly, it is one that puts many, including many of America’s allies, in alignment with many in America, Democrat and Republican, who when asked why these elections went as they did, point at the prices displayed outside any petrol station.

Speaking before the votes in America were counted, the Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband reflected on this when I spoke to him on BBC Newscast.

When I asked him specifically if he feared that a domestically humiliated Trump may prove more belligerent internationally, it was to the Iran war the foreign secretary referred.

He didn’t offer a direct answer to my question, but chose instead to say this: “I know that one of the biggest responsibilities of the whole government, frankly, is the cost of living situation at home, and we know one of the biggest contributors to the cost of living situation is, frankly, the conflict.”

“The Strait of Hormuz being not exactly closed, but not properly open, not free flowing, and that is hitting families at home,” he said.

“We know that we need a diplomatic way out of this conflict, and so that is one of the things that we’re working on. It’s something I talked to the U.S. Secretary of State about at the G20, and it’s something we continue to work on,” he added.

The foreign secretary met Marco Rubio at the meeting in Atlanta last week.

But the big question for the British government, and so many others, is does defeat at home make it more likely that President Trump gets angrier abroad?

Or, do America’s traditional allies, the UK, the European Union, Canada, Australia and others feel more strident and willing to work with Donald Trump’s domestic political opponents to try to challenge and restrain a weakened president?

The answers to these two final questions will determine much in world affairs in the next couple of years.

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