Global Microsoft 365 outage leaves users locked out of Outlook, Teams and other services

In brief

• A global outage hit Microsoft 365 on Thursday, leaving many users unable to access Outlook email.
• Microsoft says several services, including Teams, SharePoint Online and Copilot 365, were affected.
• The company has restarted failed servers, redirected traffic and is rolling out an automated recovery process.

Outage spreads worldwide

Microsoft said on Thursday evening that some users may be unable to connect to a number of Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and Microsoft Copilot 365 (Microsoft 365 z globalną awarią. Trwają prace nad przywróceniem usług dla klientów – Onet). The company also listed Microsoft Defender XDR, Planner, To Do and Purview among the affected applications (Problemy z Microsoft 365. Nie działa wiele usług – RMF24).

The problems first appeared in North America and later spread to South America. Microsoft then confirmed that the impact was global, affecting users in all regions (Globalna awaria Microsoftu. Nie działają aplikacje i usługi – Polsat News). Reports of Outlook failures and access problems with mailboxes were among the most frequent complaints (Globalna awaria usług Microsoft. Użytkownicy mają problemy z dostępem do e-mail – Rzeczpospolita).

Cause and response

According to Microsoft, part of its infrastructure was overloaded in several regions, which likely caused the connection errors. The company said it had paused all deployments, redirected extra traffic away from the affected infrastructure and restarted servers that had failed.

Microsoft also examined recent configuration changes and a small number of updates as possible triggers. It said it had approved an alternative health-check method for part of the infrastructure, which allowed those servers to recover. The firm is now extending that change more broadly and preparing an automated recovery process that would continuously detect and restart unresponsive servers.

Scale of reports

User complaints were visible on outage-tracking platforms. Downdetector recorded thousands of reports about Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams on Thursday, according to Wirtualna Polska (Awaria usług Microsoft. Tysiące użytkowników zgłaszają problemy – Wirtualna Polska). Business Insider Polska reported that the outage reached users in several regions, including Poland, and involved Outlook, Teams and Copilot (Globalna awaria Microsoftu. Outlook niedostępny dla wielu użytkowników – Business Insider Polska).

At the time of writing, Microsoft had not given a full restoration time. The company said it was working on bringing services back for customers.

Read also

• Microsoft Outlook Hit by Fresh Global Outage as Exchange Online Users Lose Email Access