Microsoft is working to mitigate a widespread outage impacting its Microsoft 365 suite, including Teams, Exchange Online and Copilot, as first reported by CRN.
The Redmond, Washington-based vendor reported that the service disruptions were caused by a subset of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which strained the remaining infrastructure. Microsoft confirmed that the elevated load was not driven by an increase in user traffic. To address the issue, the company paused all deployments, moved traffic off affected infrastructure, and restarted servers to restore functionality. The outage impacted various services, including SharePoint Online, Microsoft Defender XDR, Outlook.com, and OneDrive.
Downdetector recorded significant spikes in user reports, with Outlook peaking at 130,000 reports and the Microsoft 365 suite reaching 46,000 reports. Industry partners noted that while cloud-hosted platforms are not immune to issues, the scale of this disruption during prime business hours highlights the critical need for robust redundancy and failover systems. Microsoft continues to redistribute connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure to balance the load and restore full service to all affected regions.
Source: CRN
