Topline
Microsoft’s widespread outage affecting Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services continued into Friday, disrupting businesses, airlines and government agencies worldwide, as the tech giant reported signs of progress with its latest attempt to fix the problem after earlier efforts failed.
This story was first published by Forbes.com
Key Facts
In its latest service-health update, Microsoft said it was seeing “positive results for server stability” after deploying a new patch to its systems, although the outage has not yet been resolved.
The company added it is monitoring the progress of this fix and is working to expand it to additional servers.
The update did not provide an estimated timeline for when Microsoft expects to fully restore the disrupted services for all users.
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The disruption, which began Thursday afternoon, primarily affected Microsoft’s Exchange Online email infrastructure, preventing users from accessing their Outlook mailboxes and causing delayed email deliveries.
Other Microsoft services, including Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, and Microsoft Defender XDR, were also impacted by the outage.
Outlook outage reports on Downdetector.com peaked at 130,000 complaints on Thursday afternoon, and reports of problems were still being logged early Friday.
Was The Microsoft Outage Caused By A Hack?
In its latest service-health update, Microsoft noted it has found no indication that the outage was caused by malicious activity. The company added that it is continuing to treat the incident with “urgency and priority until full resolution” and will provide full details about the root cause after it has been mitigated. The company initially attributed the disruption to unusually high loads on its infrastructure, but later clarified that the increased load was caused by unexpectedly unavailable servers rather than a surge in user traffic. Microsoft later found that a process that was responsible for establishing secure connections was becoming overwhelmed, causing impacted servers to stop responding. However, Microsoft has not yet established a definitive root cause.
Which Businesses Have Been Impacted By The Microsoft Outage?
In India, the outage affected operations of several airlines, with IndiGo and Akasa Air reporting disruptions to their customer-support email services. Air India said it temporarily rerouted emails to maintain customer support. The two leading artificial intelligence companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, were also impacted as users reported failures involving their Microsoft 365 integration tools. OpenAI said new connections to Microsoft’s services may fail and existing tools may not work as expected, while Anthropic reported that email, calendar and search tools in its Microsoft 365 connector were failing for most requests,
TANGENT
Microsoft’s stock nearly flattened out before the market closed Thursday. Shares are up nearly 28% in the last six months of trading, correcting from significant lows recorded throughout the first half of the year.
Key Background
Microsoft 365 also experienced an outage in August, when users had issues logging in and connecting to the service, as well as problems sending and receiving emails. It took a few days for systems to fully recover from the disruptions caused by the rollout of a code update.
