Almost 20,000 reports a minute as Microsoft hit by widespread outage

Microsoft is applying an age-old IT fix as it attempts to restore services, turning servers off and on again, after tens of thousands of users reported outages around the world.

The widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, Teams and Copilot, as many users had issues accessing or sending emails, while other errors affected the tech giant’s apps.

Microsoft users were hit with a widespread outage overnight. APNearly 130,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook and other Microsoft services, beginning just before 5am (AEDT). At one point, reports to the platform reached almost 20,000 per minute, stemming from outages across five Microsoft services in 74 countries.

New reports have since fallen from that peak, but many said they couldn’t send and receive emails, or had trouble loading their inboxes.

Thousands also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app Teams, as well as its AI assistant Copilot and wider Microsoft 365 services.

Servers had to be restarted after they stopped responding while the company worked to validate a change aimed at fixing the outage.

An “alternative health check method” allowed servers to return.

“We’re now applying this change more broadly,” Microsoft said. The company is also preparing an automated recovery process to detect and restart other unresponsive servers.

“A small number of configuration updates” have been identified as “potential contributors” to the issue, but Microsoft said investigations are continuing.

A further update was due by 9.30am.

The issue has prevented organisations from sending or responding to emails on Friday morning.

“We’re also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests,” Microsoft said on social media.

In updates posted earlier, Microsoft said it was aware of users “experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes”.

Microsoft later explained that a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load”, which it said was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”. The company determined several servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” due to a problem that caused them to fail during automated checks.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” the Microsoft 365 Status account wrote on X.

The company earlier said it had “successfully restored” problems related to Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.

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