Microsoft begins restoring services after global outage hits 365 suite
A widespread disruption affected Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, with nearly 130,000 users reporting problems at the peak of the outage.
Microsoft has started restoring services following a global outage that disrupted its Microsoft 365 suite, including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and OneDrive. According to the Times of India, the company has returned a portion of the affected servers to service and reported that they have remained stable so far.
The outage, which occurred on Thursday, caused issues for nearly 130,000 users worldwide at its peak, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Users reported difficulties loading inboxes, sending or receiving emails, and accessing the AI assistant Copilot and the messaging app Teams.
Microsoft stated that some servers became unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated health checks. This caused an increased load on the remaining infrastructure, which the company said was likely contributing to connectivity errors. The company noted that this high load was not caused by an increase in overall traffic, but by the reduced availability of servers.
The disruption also impacted AI services. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems with the Microsoft 365 connectors used by ChatGPT and Claude, respectively.
Microsoft has paused all deployments and configuration changes while it investigates whether recent updates caused the issue. The company is currently moving traffic to alternative routes and using an alternative health-check method to bring more servers back online.