Microsoft outage worldwide: Outlook and Teams down across the globe

A worldwide Microsoft 365 outage knocked Outlook, Teams and other workplace tools offline around the globe on Thursday. The failure began at 11:17 a.m. Eastern time and was still unresolved by the evening.

According to Downdetector, more than 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook around 1:00 p.m., along with tens of thousands of reports about Microsoft 365 and Teams. Affected services include Exchange Online, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender XDR, according to Microsoft.

The company blamed the problem on 'a large number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable,' which overloaded the remaining infrastructure, and ruled out a surge in traffic. Microsoft said it is restarting servers and moving traffic off the affected infrastructure, but as of 5:11 p.m. it had given no estimated time for full recovery.

Nothing published by Microsoft points to a cyberattack, according to specialist press reports. The outage also affected connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's artificial intelligence services.

While service is being restored, users can check the Microsoft 365 status page. Cached mail may still be readable even when a connection cannot be established.

Photo: TechCrunch

Source: Reuters and TechCrunch