Microsoft 365 Outlook, Teams, Copilot and several Microsoft applications experienced a disruption, impacting thousands of users globally on Friday. The outage lasted approximately 12 hours, with disruptions continuing into Friday, leaving employees struggling to access emails, attend meetings, and carrying out their day-to-day operations tasks.
Microsoft outage hit government agencies in Australia, the United States and Japan, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. This marks Microsoft’s second disruption of the year, raising concerns that frequent failures could push corporate clients to question Microsoft’s reliability.
Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s Executive Vice-president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said on X that there are no indication that the disruption was due to “malicious or cyber activity.”
Which Microsoft’s Services Were Affected?
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported Outlook issues at its peak in the US at around 1 p.m. on Thursday. Users experienced issues sending and receiving emails, loading inboxes, and accessing Microsoft 365 applications.
In the company’s latest update, Microsoft 365 said on X, “We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.”
“We’re reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability,” Microsoft said on X.
OpenAI and Anthropic both reported “errors” affecting Microsoft 365 connectors. The disruption caused due to elevated load across its infrastructure which caused several servers to go unexpectedly unavailable during automated health checks.
Microsoft’s Move Towards the Recovery Efforts
The company said, initial recovery measures were not working as expected and thus looking for alternative solutions to recover services. Also stated, the servers returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic, Microsoft is analyzing diagnostic data to determine what’s triggering the behavior.
This incident highlights businesses depending on cloud-based productivity platforms like Microsoft. Even though Microsoft continued working to restore affected systems, it did not provide a confirmed timeline for complete recovery. Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that influenced its suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.
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