On Thursday morning, users reported significant issues with various Microsoft services, prompting concerns about a widespread outage. Services impacted included Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, leading many to turn to Downdetector for real-time updates.
Extent of the Outage
Initial reports indicated that by 1 p.m. ET, Outlook outages surged, reaching approximately 83,000 complaints. By mid-afternoon, this figure decreased to nearly 75,000. Meanwhile, Teams incidents also saw fluctuations, with reports later falling to under 26,000. Copilot notifications decreased to around 2,000.
Microsoft's Response
Microsoft acknowledged the issue via a post on X at 10:40 a.m. ET, stating they were investigating the matter. Just a couple of hours later, the company claimed that the problems had been resolved, only to have users report ongoing difficulties with Outlook, Teams, and OneDrive as late as 1:43 p.m. ET.
Service Status Challenges
During this period, users also struggled with access to Microsoft's status page, which appeared to be down. Access to the page was restored at around 3:05 p.m. ET, allowing some users to check for updates.
User Experiences during the Outage
Many users expressed their frustrations, including an attorney from a law firm who reported that she was unable to send or receive emails after 2 p.m. ET; however, she could still search through her inbox. Her firm indicated that the issue was not limited to their organization, but rather a global outage.
Current Troubleshooting Efforts
As of 2:31 p.m. ET, Microsoft announced that they had temporarily paused all deployments and were in the process of restarting affected servers. In their updates, they explained that heightened server load resulted not from increased user traffic but rather from a number of servers going offline unexpectedly.
Administrators dealing with the disruption were directed to refer to the Microsoft 365 admin center for ongoing updates and specific incident codes EX1550543 and MO1550821. Additionally, users were encouraged to check the status updates regularly, especially if they encountered difficulties accessing the admin center.
This situation is continuously developing, and Microsoft has committed to providing users with more information as it becomes available. For now, affected users are advised to stay updated and remain patient while Microsoft works diligently to rectify the service disruptions.
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