Microsoft 365 outage disrupts email, Office apps and Teams
Users of Microsoft 365 reported problems reaching the company's suite of work tools, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. The Guardian reported that Down Detector, a website that collects user reports of outages, recorded nearly 130,000 reports of issues accessing the service.
Affected users said they could not send and receive emails and had trouble loading their inboxes. The disruption also reached SharePoint and OneDrive, enterprise services used for sharing and storing files, as well as Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.
Microsoft said it was investigating reports that users were having trouble accessing Exchange Online mailboxes, its hosted email service, through several connection methods. In a service degradation alert, a notice that a service is running below its normal level, the company said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load, which was likely contributing to connectivity errors.
Microsoft later determined that a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated checks. It said the elevated load was not caused by an overall increase in traffic. Instead, the many servers that went offline shifted their work onto the infrastructure that remained running.
To address the problem, Microsoft said it was restarting affected servers to return them to service. It said it was aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce the impact on users. The company also paused all deployments and configuration changes while it reviewed recent changes to see whether any were connected to the outage.
Microsoft said it had successfully restored Teams-related problems in North America. Its public status page reports a service degradation for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers and states that users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services. The company said it posted the information there because administrators may be unable to reach the admin center, the control panel where service health information is normally found.
