Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 services worldwide, including India
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New Delhi: Microsoft faced a widespread outage affecting several of its core workplace services, including Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams, with users across the globe reporting access problems on Friday morning. The disruption also affected users in India, where complaints began early in the day.
Outage-tracking website Downdetector recorded more than 1 lakh reports related to Outlook at the peak of the disruption. Reports later declined, but thousands of users continued to face difficulties accessing Microsoft services.
Microsoft said the incident could affect connectivity to multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot and Defender XDR. The outage also impacted connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI services.
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” Microsoft said, adding that it was sharing updates through its admin centre. The company said it was investigating the issue and working to restore normal service.
In its latest update, Microsoft attributed the disruption to a large number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable. It did not explain the underlying cause of the server failure.
The company said that, for users unable to access the admin centre, some infrastructure was experiencing elevated load. Microsoft said it was redistributing connection traffic across its global network, pausing deployments, moving traffic away from affected systems and restarting affected servers.
Microsoft also confirmed that its Defender XDR security system was affected by the outage. Earlier, the company said it had resolved a Teams disruption affecting users in North America, but later indicated that the issue could also affect Microsoft 365 connectivity in other regions.
Indian users reported service disruptions beginning early Friday morning. Downdetector recorded 808 complaints for Outlook, 230 for Microsoft 365 and 48 for Teams in the early hours, reflecting the global nature of the outage.
The disruption lasted for several hours, affecting email, collaboration tools and other workplace applications. Microsoft continued to investigate the incident and said it was working to reduce the impact on users.
Microsoft had earlier faced a major outage in September, when a days-long disruption affected Microsoft 365, including Outlook. The company had attributed that incident to a core authentication configuration issue.
(Inputs from IANS)