Microsoft outage hits thousands globally, disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot
Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft applications remained disrupted for thousands of users for over five hours on Friday, with the outage also affecting connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic's AI services.
Reports of Outlook outages on Downdetector peaked at around 1.30 am IST on Friday (1 pm ET on Thursday), with 1,38,058 reports, before falling to approximately 34,490 by 4.30 am IST.
The company, in a statement issued at 3.30 am on Friday, said it was working to restore the affected servers, with services recovering gradually as users reconnected.
The company said the outage was caused by several servers unexpectedly going offline and struggling to handle the load. It clarified that the disruption was not due to increased traffic.
"We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Microsoft said the servers that had been restored were stable. It was redirecting traffic through alternate routes and working to bring the remaining affected servers back online.
"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," the company said.
The disruption also affected third-party services relying on Microsoft's infrastructure.
OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors that could prevent new connections and cause tools to malfunction.
Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The outage comes weeks after Microsoft reported a disruption to its Azure cloud platform, which affected its productivity software suite and businesses across several industries worldwide.
The impact extended to businesses, with electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduling its third-quarter results announcement from November 12 to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.- Ends
