Microsoft is currently experiencing a widespread outage affecting several of its major services, including Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, Copilot, OneDrive, and Azure. The disruption has reportedly lasted for more than five hours, with tens of thousands of users reporting issues with each service.
According to DownDetector, reports of outages have surged across the affected platforms, suggesting that the disruption is widespread rather than isolated to individual users. Microsoft has yet to provide a definitive timeline for when all of its services will return to normal.
Server Issues Behind The Outage
In its initial updates, Microsoft attributed the disruption to several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, rather than an increase in user traffic. This has resulted in elevated loads across multiple regions, putting additional strain on the company’s infrastructure.
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” Microsoft said in an update. The company added that it had paused all deployments, redirected additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and restarted the impacted servers in an attempt to restore service.
However, subsequent recovery efforts did not always provide the anticipated relief. While Microsoft managed to return some affected servers to service, it later discovered that they could become unresponsive again once they started receiving traffic.
Microsoft Continues Recovery Efforts
In its latest updates via the official Microsoft 365 Status account on X, the company said it was investigating what was causing the restored servers to become unresponsive. It was also temporarily restricting certain types of traffic from reaching the affected infrastructure in selected locations.
Additionally, Microsoft began rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous configuration to determine whether doing so would prevent the same behaviour from recurring. The company has since reported positive results from its efforts to restart the affected infrastructure and restore server availability in isolation.
Microsoft is currently monitoring the performance and stability of these recovered infrastructure segments before expanding the recovery measures more broadly. While this suggests that progress is being made, the company has yet to confirm that the outage has been fully resolved.
(Source: Microsoft, via X)
