Microsoft: Positive Results from Attempts to Fix Global Outage Affecting Teams, Outlook

By Staff, Agencies 

Microsoft announced that it is “seeing positive results” from its efforts to fix an outage of some of its systems that has caused huge disruption to users, organizations and businesses across the globe.

The tech company said it is attempting to improve capacity to enable more users to get back on its systems, after a global outage affected millions of users for more than 12 hours on Thursday and Friday.

In an update shortly after 7am GMT, it said: “We’re seeing positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure.

“We’ll continue to monitor its progress and are working to expand it to servers supporting active regions coming online.”

Microsoft said that there were no indications that the outage was caused by a cyber-attack.

Earlier, the company had said it was only seeing “marginal success” from its efforts to bring its systems fully back online. It had said that a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load” – which was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors”.

The company determined a number of servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” because of a problem that caused them to fail during automated checks.

It earlier warned that services that have restarted can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic.

“Once mitigated, we will provide full details of the root cause, defense-in-depth repair items, and more within a post-incident report,” Microsoft said.

The outage website Down Detector showed an increase in Microsoft 365 problems at about 1pm ET, with nearly 130,000 reports of problems in 74 countries affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. AI assistant Copilot was also affected.

Microsoft has suggested the outage may have been caused by problems with the settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 up and running.

Microsoft’s executive vice-president of Copilot, Charles Lamanna, posted on X that the company would share more information when it became available. “We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” he said.

The Microsoft outage also hit connectors used by ⁠OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI ⁠services.

OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools were not working as ⁠expected. Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.