Overview
- Microsoft acknowledged degraded functionality in Exchange Online and Outlook on August 31, saying engineers are reviewing service telemetry to find the cause.
- OpenAI confirmed a separate outage that made ChatGPT Work unavailable for about three hours on the same day and said the service was fully restored by evening.
- Reporting and initial company checks found no technical connection between the two incidents and investigators have not reported any shared fault.
- User reports aggregated by Downdetector peaked at about 6,015 for Outlook and 2,044 for Microsoft 365 during the Microsoft incident.
- The outages have highlighted reliability and reputational risk for enterprise cloud and AI tools even as Microsoft posts record revenue, Azure tops $100 billion annual revenue, Copilot passes 30 million paid seats, and the company plans heavy data‑center spending going forward.