Microsoft begins restoring services after global outage hits 365 suite
Nearly 130,000 users worldwide reported disruptions to Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 applications during the outage.
Microsoft has started bringing its services back online following a global outage that disrupted access to the Microsoft 365 suite, according to reports from Times of India, Firstpost, and BusinessLine. The disruption affected several applications, including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive, and the AI assistant Copilot.
The outage reached a peak of nearly 130,000 user reports on Downdetector. Many users experienced difficulties loading inboxes or sending and receiving emails through Exchange Online. Thousands of others reported issues with Teams and various cloud-based services.
Microsoft stated that a section of the impacted servers has been restored and is currently holding steady. The company is also rerouting traffic through different pathways to mitigate the disruption and is working on an automated system to identify and restart servers that stop responding.
The tech giant identified that an elevated load on its infrastructure was likely causing connectivity errors. This load was not caused by an increase in total traffic, but by several servers becoming unavailable after failing automated health checks, which shifted the weight onto the remaining systems.
A review of recent configuration updates has been identified as a possible cause of the incident. Microsoft has paused all new deployments and configuration changes while it investigates whether these updates are linked to the outage.
The company noted that a core process on the affected servers became overwhelmed, leading to unresponsiveness. While some services like Teams have seen restoration in North America, the company said customers may experience a gradual recovery as they reconnect.