Microsoft Extends Email Timeout Window To 48 Hours – Highlights Recovery Progress Across Asia-Pacific Infrastructure

• Microsoft said there has been no evidence of malicious activity associated with the outage.
• Microsoft Outlook had more than 1,586 outage reports on Downdetector as of 5:51 a.m. ET on Friday.
• The company previously suffered a widespread Microsoft 365 outage in January 2026

Microsoft (MSFT) has extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to prevent delayed messages from being lost, as a widespread outage affecting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services continued into Friday.

In a service status update, Microsoft said recovery efforts were progressing in phases, but some services remained unstable.

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“To protect email during recovery, we’re continuing to prioritize queue and backlog processing, and the email timeout window has been extended to 48 hours to preserve delayed messages,” the company said.

The extension allows delayed emails to remain in the system longer while Microsoft works through the backlog.

MSFT shares were down 1.5% at the time of writing.

Microsoft Sees Gradual Recovery, Rules Out Cyberattack For Now

In its latest status update, the company said it had made further progress in restoring services, completing recovery measures across parts of its affected infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region.

“Traffic is being gradually restored, and we’re seeing improvements in key customer scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing. Our focus is now on extending these recovery actions across affected infrastructure in other regions, while continuing stabilization efforts and adding supporting capacity to improve service consistency.”

“At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” the company added.

Microsoft Outlook had more than 1,586 outage reports on Downdetector as of 5:51 a.m. ET on Friday. More than 70 countries reported problems accessing Microsoft’s products, according to reports.

The disruption began on Thursday, at around 11:17 a.m. ET, initially affecting Exchange Online mailbox access, with Microsoft later confirming connectivity issues across other Microsoft 365 services, including Teams, Copilot and SharePoint.

Microsoft previously suffered a widespread Microsoft 365 outage in January 2026. In July 2024, a faulty CrowdStrike update disrupted around 8.5 million Windows devices worldwide, although that incident had a different cause.

Microsoft said it would publish a detailed post-incident report after fully resolving the disruption.

Retail Calls Outage A ‘Temporary Headwind’

Retail sentiment surrounding MSFT on Stocktwits turned ‘bearish’ from ‘Neutral’ over the past 24 hours, amid ‘high’ message volumes.

One user called the outage a temporary headwind and not a fundamental issue.

MSFT shares have gained about 6% so far in 2026.

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