Here's what is behind Microsoft's global outage
What's the story
Microsoft is experiencing a major outage on Friday, affecting its popular services like Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. The tech giant has now revealed that the disruption was caused by a number of servers failing automated health checks and going offline. This led to connectivity issues as its traffic was rerouted to the remaining infrastructure. The company has not yet provided a detailed explanation or an estimated timeline for full service restoration.
Service disruption
Disruption to multiple Microsoft services
The outage has affected a wide range of Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Copilot. Users across multiple countries reported issues accessing these services.
Downdetector recorded over 130,000 reports of problems with Outlook alone at the peak of the disruption.
"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution," said Microsoft.
Extended impact
Issues with Microsoft 365 applications
The disruption is not limited to Outlook and Teams. Other applications relying on Exchange Online, Microsoft's cloud-based email and messaging platform, are also facing issues.
This includes problems accessing recently used files and certain workplace applications in Microsoft 365, as well as difficulties with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
AI disruption
Impact on communication and collaboration platforms
The outage has also affected communication and collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online.
Some core functions of Teams remained operational, but users reported problems with chats, conversations, calendar functions, meeting scheduling, invitations, among others.
AI services such as Microsoft Copilot have also been impacted by the outage.
The incident highlights the heavy reliance of businesses, government agencies, and third-party technology platforms on Microsoft's cloud-based infrastructure.
Update
Microsoft is still working to fix the problem
"We're continuing to monitor activity across regions to evaluate server status and determine actions that can be taken to improve capacity," said Microsoft.
"This includes reviewing server performance and confirming that developed patches have been applied and working as intended after infrastructure reboots are completed."
The tech giant added, "At this point, we have observed marginal success. In parallel, we're taking action to expand capacity through the utilization of Virtual Machines."