Millions of users faced disruptions on Thursday and Friday after a global Microsoft 365 outage hit Outlook email, Teams, and Copilot across 74 countries.
Problems began shortly before 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. Nearly 130,000 users reported problems on Downdetector. Microsoft reported that a core process on affected servers became overwhelmed. This caused capacity loss and health checks to pull healthy infrastructure offline.
“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” Microsoft 365 Status shared in its latest update.
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. More info under…
Engineers attempted to route traffic through alternative pathways and restart unresponsive infrastructure. Returned servers frequently crashed again upon receiving new traffic. Microsoft said that it was not aware of any malicious activity causing the incident.
“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” Charles Lamanna, Microsoft's executive vice president of Copilot, Agents and Platform, said in a post on X late on Thursday.
The disruption hit government agencies, corporate operations, and educational institutions globally. Heavy impacts were reported in Australia. Australian Home Affairs and Cyber Security Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft believed it was dealing with an issue resembling the 2024 CrowdStrike software malfunction.
“They believe they are dealing in some ways similar to what we saw with respect to CrowdStrike where there is an update that has gone awry,” Burke said at a press conference.
Federal departments, including the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, experienced messaging disruptions. Immigration New Zealand paused visa application processing.
The US House of Representatives reported internal user impacts. Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki confirmed that government information systems were affected. Financial institutions and insurers in Taiwan, along with airlines such as Air India, temporarily rerouted communications to maintain customer messaging.
We’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue. To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as…
Earlier coverage: Global Microsoft Outage Disrupts Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 Services
We're engaged in multiple workstreams to alleviate impact, address our current blocker, and returning portions of service infrastructure back to a healthy state. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as…
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We've reviewed known impact scenarios and revised the list of impacted services and features, which can be viewed in the "more info" section of the communication MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://t.co/uFnnN6Svuf if the admin center is not available…
The servers we returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic; we're analyzing diagnostic data to determine what's triggering the behavior. In parallel, we're temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in some…
We're returning a portion of affected servers to the service, and they remain stable so far. We're also shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible and observing limited recovery. In parallel, we've streamlined the process of returning the remaining affected servers to…
We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from…
We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're providing more information under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as…
We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
Microsoft 365 outages continue into the early hours of this morning, as the company says it will "seek to attain persistent recovery." Anyone else having a stressful time at work? We haven't seen our Outlook emails in a while now 👀https://t.co/uyxit6TF78
Microsoft Outlook is down. Microsoft 365 issues are cutting people off from their email, as well as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft 365 Copilot https://t.co/4odaKBRKQS
