Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams suffered a major global disruption on Friday, leaving thousands of users, including in India, unable to access essential services…reports Asian Lite News Desk
Microsoft’s services, including Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams, suffered a major global outage on Friday morning, leaving thousands of users across several countries, including India, unable to access the platforms. The disruption also affected connectors used by artificial intelligence services from OpenAI and Anthropic, while the company scrambled to restore normal operations.
More than 100,000 users reported problems with Outlook on outage-tracking website Downdetector, highlighting the scale of the disruption.
Microsoft acknowledged the incident, saying it was working to minimise the impact and restore affected services.
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” the company said in a statement, adding that it was providing updates through its admin centre.
In its latest update, Microsoft attributed the disruption to “a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable”. However, it did not explain what had caused the servers to become unavailable.
The company said its technical teams were continuing to investigate the incident and implement measures to restore services.
In a post on X addressing users unable to access the admin centre, Microsoft said some of its infrastructure was experiencing “elevated load”.
It added that it was “redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load”.
As part of its recovery efforts, Microsoft said it had paused all deployments, was shifting additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure and restarting impacted servers to bring them back online.
The outage also affected Microsoft’s Defender XDR security system, adding to the range of services experiencing disruption.
Microsoft works to restore affected services
Earlier on Friday, Microsoft said it had resolved a disruption affecting Teams users in North America, adding that the impact of that particular incident had been fully addressed.
However, the company subsequently indicated that the problem could also affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity in other regions, suggesting that the disruption extended beyond North America.
The outage caused difficulties for users relying on Microsoft’s productivity and communication platforms for everyday work, including email access, online meetings and collaboration.
The disruption to connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s artificial intelligence services also highlighted the wider impact of problems affecting Microsoft’s infrastructure.
Not the first major Microsoft outage
The latest disruption comes less than two months after Microsoft experienced another significant outage in September, when problems affected Microsoft 365, its cloud-based productivity suite that includes Outlook.
At the time, the company attributed the incident to an issue involving a “core authentication configuration”, which prevented users from accessing the service.
Microsoft has not yet disclosed the precise cause of Friday’s disruption. Its investigation into the server availability issues and infrastructure load was continuing.
