Microsoft struggles to restore Teams, Outlook, Copilot after global outage
What's the story
Microsoft is facing a major global outage that has disrupted several of its services, including Teams, Outlook, and Copilot. The issue has led to widespread connectivity problems for users relying on Microsoft 365 apps. According to Downdetector's data, the number of reported issues with Outlook peaked at nearly 140,000 globally around 6:00pm GMT yesterday.
Ongoing issues
Microsoft is working to restore affected services
Microsoft is working to restore the affected services but has faced difficulties in its recovery efforts.
The company said it had been monitoring changes made to improve service availability, but they were "not taking as expected."
Microsoft is now looking at alternative ways to increase infrastructure capacity while dealing with persistent imbalances in traffic management.
Service disruption
Outage impacts Microsoft 365 services
The outage has affected several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and Copilot.
Users have reported connectivity issues and difficulties accessing tools used for everyday work.
Businesses and organizations relying on Microsoft's services for email, workplace communication, and collaboration have also been impacted by the disruption.
Root cause
Microsoft identifies key factor behind outage
Microsoft's investigation has revealed that a process responsible for establishing secure connections on the affected servers was a key factor behind the disruption.
The process was becoming overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests.
The company is preparing a configuration change to address this issue and testing it on a subset of servers before wider rollout.
Wider impact
Third-party services also affected by the disruption
The disruption has not only affected Microsoft's own applications but also third-party services relying on its infrastructure.
OpenAI has reported issues with its Microsoft connectors and Anthropic with its Microsoft 365 connector due to the outage.
Businesses such as Electric truck maker Workhorse Group have also been impacted, with one rescheduling its third-quarter results announcement due to business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.