As an outage that affected Outlook email inboxes and other Microsoft services across the globe entered a second day, the company said it was seeing encouraging progress toward a stable restoration.

After a day of online jokes and speculation around the massive disruption, Microsoft said Friday morning that there were no signs that a cyberattack or rogue artificial intelligence agents were to blame. Rather, it was a technical issue caused by the company trying to upgrade network capacity.

“We are deeply sorry for the disruption this incident has caused our customers and partners,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “We know the trust they place in our services and take that responsibility extremely seriously.”

The company will issue a full post-incident report once its review is complete.

Microsoft Executive Vice President Charles Lamanna, who oversees Copilot and the platform behind Outlook, tried Thursday to snuff out any speculation of cyberattacks.

“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Lamanna said in a social media post Thursday night.

Starting around 9:30 a.m. Thursday, tens of thousands of users reported connectivity issues with various services under the Microsoft 365 umbrella, including Outlook, Copilot, the messaging app Teams, Word, Excel and other productivity software. As the day progressed, disruptions primarily affected Exchange Online, the engine behind Outlook and other Microsoft messaging services.

The situation did not look good Thursday evening. While one side of the globe turned away from their abnormally quiet devices, Microsoft’s updates said that attempted fixes weren’t working to resolve the outage as it stretched beyond normal downtimes. At one point Thursday night, Microsoft said attempted repairs were “not taking as expected.”

As residents in Asia, Europe and Africa began rising for the day Friday, Outlook systems still weren’t fully online. But as morning arrived in the U.S., Microsoft’s updates looked more positive and the company said it was slowly bringing email service back. Full restoration of emails sent Thursday may lag as the company aims for a gradual and stable recovery.

Microsoft said early on that it was aware of the issues and had begun investigating. The company provided updates throughout the day Thursday as it scrambled for a fix. Microsoft initially determined that overloaded servers may have contributed to the problem, but later said it wasn’t because of extraordinarily high traffic. Servers, which undergo automated health checks, were failing and dropping offline, straining the remaining infrastructure.

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