Microsoft pauses deployments as attempts to restore Outlook and Teams after outage aren’t going as expected
Widespread service disruption
Outages affected major Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365, with thousands of users reporting problems. Reports later declined somewhat, but some users still could not send or receive email or open their inboxes.
The disruption also reached integration connectors used by AI providers OpenAI and Anthropic. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue in which new Microsoft connector connections could break and tools might not work as expected.
Microsoft outlines recovery steps
Microsoft said it had paused all deployments and was routing extra traffic away from affected infrastructure. It was also restarting and checking impacted servers as it worked to restore service.
The company said infrastructure in multiple regions was under elevated load, which it believed was contributing to connection errors. It also tested a configuration change after servers began failing automated health checks and becoming unavailable.
Changes still under assessment
Microsoft said it was monitoring the effects of its changes and looking for further steps to improve service health across affected regions. It also assessed whether reversing some recent configuration updates could speed recovery.
The company said an alternative health-check method had helped some affected servers return to service, and that it was applying the change more broadly. Microsoft was also preparing automated systems to detect and restart unresponsive servers.
Key points
- Outages hit Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365, affecting thousands of users.
- Some users continued to report email and inbox access problems after reports declined.
- Microsoft paused deployments, redirected traffic and restarted affected servers.
- OpenAI investigated broken connections involving Microsoft connectors.