Microsoft is working to restore several services, including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Copilot, following a massive global outage that began Thursday. The company reported that its server infrastructure was experiencing elevated load, which is likely contributing to connectivity errors. While some services were partially restored by Friday evening, more than 10,000 users continued to report issues accessing major online applications. Outlook was identified as one of the most severely affected services, with users unable to access inboxes or send emails.
Microsoft stated it has no indication of a cyber-attack and is currently attempting to mitigate connectivity issues by restarting and validating affected servers. Engineers are also assessing whether recent configuration updates caused the problems and if reverting those updates could accelerate recovery. However, the company reported that some servers returned to service became unresponsive again once they received traffic. To manage the situation, Microsoft is temporarily limiting the types of traffic that can reach affected infrastructure in certain regions.
In a recent update, the company noted that fixes are not working as expected and engineers are identifying alternate workstreams to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances. The disruption has impacted various organizations, including AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI, which reported that the connectivity issues caused productivity tools to malfunction at their offices.
Mark Gregory, an associate professor in the School of Engineering at RMIT University, told The Guardian that the outage is likely affecting the network layer in Microsoft's systems. Gregory suggested the situation may be similar to a 2023 configuration issue that downed the Optus network. He noted that when configuration servers face connectivity issues, users are forced to share a smaller pool of online servers, which can lead to live servers crashing from being overloaded.
