Microsoft has extended the email waiting window to 48 hours to protect messages delayed by the Outlook outage. The company has adopted this measure while it continues working to restore Exchange Online, the service that allows access to mailboxes and managing the email of Microsoft 365.
The company states that it is starting to observe signs of stabilization in part of its infrastructure, although it warns that the service’s capacity has not yet returned to normal levels. Recovery remains gradual and depends on servers maintaining their stability as they begin receiving traffic again.
The incident began on Thursday, November 12, and has affected access to mailboxes from different applications and devices, in addition to causing delays in message delivery. Microsoft keeps recovery tasks open and has not declared the problem resolved.
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The extension of the waiting window seeks to preserve messages that remain pending during the disruption. Microsoft has explained that it is prioritizing email queues and their status to prevent the delays generated by the incident from jeopardizing message delivery.
The measure does not mean that all emails will necessarily arrive within that timeframe or that the service has been recovered. This is temporary protection while technical teams work to restore Exchange Online’s capacity.
Outlook is not the only service affected
The incident also reaches other tools of Microsoft 365 when their functions depend on Exchange Online. Among them are certain Copilot operations, access to recent files, some Planner and To Do features, and features of Microsoft Defender.
In Teams, the main messaging functions and online meetings remain largely operational, but the calendar, meeting scheduling, and other email-linked operations may fail. In SharePoint, direct access to stored files continues to work, although some capabilities that depend on Exchange may be affected.