Overview
- The outage began Thursday afternoon at about 17:15 local time and has left many users unable to send or receive Outlook email or join Teams meetings.
- Microsoft says a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which increased load on the remaining systems and degraded service across its Microsoft 365 platform.
- Engineers have tried automated restarts and rerouted traffic to reduce load, and Microsoft reports partial restoration in regions where those measures were applied but no estimate for full recovery.
- The failure has disrupted businesses, courts, municipalities and regional newsrooms that have switched to phone, WhatsApp and social channels to handle urgent communications.
- Downdetector and local outage trackers show thousands of reports from roughly 70 to 74 countries, and the company says there is currently no evidence the incident was caused by malicious activity.