Microsoft says a portion of its infrastructure experienced elevated load, causing connectivity errors across Outlook, Teams and other 365 services. The company is restarting affected servers.
Microsoft experienced a widespread outage on Thursday that affected users of services including Outlook, Teams and 365, according to CNBC. The outage began shortly before 1 p.m. ET and affected thousands of users in North America, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.
The company’s Microsoft 365 Status account posted on X shortly after 1:30 p.m. ET: “We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.”
Microsoft determined that the outage was caused by an increase in unavailable servers and launched a restart of impacted servers. The shutdown may be linked to failed health checks caused by a “specific component that’s responsible for processing server health,” Microsoft added.
“We’ve taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service,” Microsoft added.
Outage website Down Detector showed a spike in Microsoft 365 problems, with nearly 130,000 reports of issues affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive, according to The Guardian. AI assistant Copilot was also affected.
Many users said they couldn’t send and receive emails, or had trouble loading their inboxes altogether.
Microsoft said it was investigating “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods.”
A service degradation alert on Microsoft’s site said it was “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact” and said it was “restarting affected servers to return them to service.”
The company also said: “As a precaution, we’ve paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event.”
“We’ve determined that the elevated load isn’t driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure,” Microsoft said.
“We’re investigating what’s causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.”
Earlier, the company said it had “successfully restored” problems related to Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.
Google and Amazon Web Services users also reported outages on Downdetector.com during the same period, CNBC reported.
Sources
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.
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Microsoft says it is addressing connectivity problems affecting Teams, Outlook and Copilot after users worldwide reported outages on Thursday.
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