Microsoft said Friday its attempts to resolve a global outage affecting services including Teams, Outlook and Copilot were not going “as expected,” as the disruption stretched past 11 hours and affected users in 74 countries.
The company said it had “engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact” and return services to “a healthy state.” About half an hour before its latest update, Microsoft said it was seeing “partial recovery” in regions where fixes had been applied, but that the actions were not “resulting in sustained recovery.”
Microsoft said the outage was not caused by a cybersecurity incident. A technology expert told the BBC that if no cyberattack was involved, the episode amounted to “incredible incompetence.”
More than 430 million people use Microsoft 365 apps. OpenAI and Anthropic reported problems as a result of the outage, according to the BBC.
Microsoft suffered a widespread outage Thursday that impacted thousands of users across regions, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com. The outage began shortly before 1 p.m. and affected Microsoft 365 services, Outlook and Teams. At the time, about 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook. Amazon Web Services and Google users also reported outages on the site.
“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC. “We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.”
Microsoft shared updates from its Microsoft 365 Status account on X. Amazon wrote on X that its services were “operating normally” and that an “unrelated disruption elsewhere on the internet is prompting some inaccurate news reports,” referring users to its health dashboard for “accurate data.”
At 4 p.m., Microsoft said it had “validated an alternative service health check method” that brought some affected servers back online. “We’re now applying this change more broadly,” Microsoft wrote. “We’re also preparing automated recovery systems to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to maintain service stability while this change progresses.”
Microsoft initially said infrastructure “elevated load across multiple regions” was responsible for the connectivity problems. The company later determined the elevated load was caused by a “number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure,” and that some servers were failing automated health checks.
“We’ve taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service,” Microsoft wrote.
