Microsoft scrambles to fix global outage affecting Teams and Outlook
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Microsoft is working to restore its services after a global outage disrupted access to Teams, Outlook and other Microsoft 365 applications for millions of users across the world for more than 12 hours.
In its latest update, the company said it was seeing “early signs of stabilisation” as it worked to increase capacity and restore services.
However, service capacity had not returned to normal levels, and performance remained variable.
Microsoft said it was extending the “email timeout window” to 48 hours to protect delayed messages during the recovery process. It added that there was no indication the outage had been caused by a cyber-attack.
The company earlier said some of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load”, likely contributing to connectivity errors. Several servers had become “unexpectedly unavailable” after failing automated checks.
The outage website Down Detector recorded nearly 130,000 reports of Microsoft 365 problems across 74 countries from around 6 pm GMT on Thursday. Users reported difficulties accessing Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot.
The disruption also affected connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic's AI services. Both companies reported problems with their Microsoft 365 integrations.
Businesses and public services across the world reported disruptions. In England, the NHS said remote therapy sessions and other services had been affected. Pharmacies also reported difficulties communicating with some GP surgeries about prescriptions.
Indian airlines IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected. Several UK police forces asked people to report crimes by phone instead of using online services.
Mark Gregory, an associate professor at RMIT University, said the outage appeared to involve Microsoft's network layer. A configuration problem may have reduced the pool of available servers, forcing more users to rely on the remaining infrastructure and causing further failures.
Microsoft said it would publish details of the root cause and planned repairs in a post-incident report.