Microsoft Office’s telecommunications services have tentatively returned after an outage downed the software’s messaging systems globally.

Several services within the Microsoft package, such as Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and the AI assistant Copilot, suffered connectivity problems yesterday afternoon.

After struggling with the blackout overnight, the company said this morning: “We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress in Europe, with service availability and e-mail delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure.

“Japan remains comparatively more stable, while North America is also improving.

“However, some users may still experience intermittent issues as recovery actions continue.”

It added: “We’re focused on addressing the remaining areas of disruption and improving service consistency across affected regions.

“Reducing e-mail queues and backlogs remains a priority and the extended 48-hour e-mail timeout window remains in place to help protect delayed messages as delivery catches up.

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

“We will continue to treat this with urgency until mitigation and we will share a full post-incident report with root cause and defence-in-depth actions after mitigation is complete.”

According to the website Downdetector, reports about Microsoft problems came in at about 1.19pm Eastern time (2.19pm in Bermuda) yesterday, before spiking to 5,520 less than 15 minutes later.

Within an hour, the number of outage reports had climbed to more than 129,000.

According to the BBC, the blackout was caused by some of Microsoft’s servers being overloaded, while some became “unexpectedly unavailable”.

The company earlier said ‌it ⁠had fixed a Teams disruption affecting users ​in North America and that ​the impact had been “fully resolved”.

However, it warned that Microsoft 365 ​service connectivity may be affected for users in other regions.

Some intermittent delays or problems could be expected in those using Microsoft Outlook.