Microsoft Says Outlook, Teams and Other Programs Disrupted by Outage for More Than Five Hours

Widespread access problems

Down Detector showed a surge in Microsoft 365 problem reports at about 1pm ET. Users reported trouble reaching Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, along with SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot.

Microsoft said it was working to restore affected servers and had observed limited recovery. The company also reported that servers already brought back online had remained stable so far.

Microsoft works to restore service

The company said part of its infrastructure was under unusually heavy load, which it said was likely contributing to connection errors. It found that a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable after failing automated checks.

Microsoft said it was routing traffic through alternative paths where possible and simplifying work to return the remaining affected servers to service. The company had earlier said it had restored Teams-related problems in North America, though some users continued to report connection difficulties.

Cloud reliability concerns

The outage also disrupted connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services. Last month, Microsoft reported an Azure cloud outage that affected its productivity software suite and industries around the world.

Gregory said configuration problems on some servers can leave customers sharing a smaller pool of servers for cloud access, creating a cascading problem. He said identifying the underlying network misconfiguration takes time.

Gregory said companies should test configuration changes in dedicated environments before deploying them on live networks. He also said businesses that depend on Microsoft 365 should have backup options, adding that an alternative becomes important when customers are left without service.