Microsoft says consumer services are back, enterprise 365 still recovering

Microsoft says its consumer products are fully recovered as of 4:10pm GMT on Friday, while enterprise Microsoft 365 services are only seeing what the company calls some sustained recovery. The global outage had crippled online communications for businesses and governments for more than 24 hours.

The company isn't closing the book on the enterprise side yet. It says it's monitoring the backlog of email messages that piled up during the event before it considers that issue resolved. In an update on its service status page, Microsoft framed the caution plainly: "Due to the severity of impact this incident caused, we're monitoring for an extended period to ensure no additional mitigative actions are required."

The disruption knocked Outlook and other services offline on Thursday. In Washington, the US Homeland Security chief confirmed there is no link between the Microsoft problem and Friday's US air stoppage. Microsoft had already said it had no indication the Federal Aviation Administration's nationwide ground stop was connected to the outage, according to a company spokesperson.