Microsoft struggling to fix global outage as company says efforts ‘not going as expected’
Microsoft is struggling to fix the widespread outage that has knocked out various platforms, including Outlook, with the company acknowledging that efforts to restore services were ‘not taking as expected.’
About 130,000 users reported that Outlook was down shortly after 1pm Eastern time on Thursday, according to Downdetector.
New reports have since fallen, but thousands worldwide are still unable to open their inboxes and send emails.
Thousands also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app, Teams, its AI assistant, Copilot, as well as other Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft said Thursday night that it was attempting to identify ‘alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances’ in order to address the outage.
Earlier today, the company said that infrastructure experiencing an ‘elevated load across multiple regions’ was likely contributing to the connectivity errors.
The outage came just days after Outlook users were urged to update their software after hackers began exploiting a security flaw that could expose information used to verify their identity.
Microsoft said the next update was expected around 11.30pm ET on Thursday.
Microsoft said Thursday night that efforts to restore services following a widespread outage were ‘not taking as expected’
Thousands worldwide have been unable to open and use Microsoft Outlook, as well as other Microsoft services, for most of the day
Microsoft said a number of servers had become ‘unexpectedly unavailable’ because of a problem that caused them to fail during ‘automated health checks.’
It was not immediately clear why that failure happened.
The company later said it was testing a fix and rolling out an alternative method to bring the impacted servers back online.
‘We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,’ Microsoft’s 365 Status account wrote on X.
Around noon, Microsoft posted that ‘mitigative actions’ had ‘successfully restored service health and functionality’ in North America.
Users insisted that was not the case as they continued reporting the outage which landed in the middle of the workday for many.
Other platforms have also been affected by the Microsoft outage.
OpenAI said Thursday afternoon that it was ‘investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.’
The company noted that ChatGPT had suffered a ‘degraded performance.’
Microsoft said earlier on Thursday that infrastructure experiencing an ‘elevated load across multiple regions’ was likely contributing to the massive outage
Another AI giant, Anthropic, also reported that users were experiencing issues caused by a Microsoft 365 service incident.
Anthropic said that mail, calendar and search tool functions in its Microsoft 365 connector were failing for most requests.
Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft told him the company did not believe the outage had been caused by a cyber attack, according to Reuters.
This is a developing story. More to come.
