A widespread technical disruption hit Microsoft systems on Thursday. The global outage affected the company’s 365 suite of programs, leaving hundreds of thousands of people unable to access key software.
The monitoring platform Down Detector recorded a sharp rise in problems. Nearly 130,000 users reported difficulties accessing applications such as Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Enterprise services, including SharePoint and OneDrive, also experienced disruptions. The artificial intelligence assistant Copilot was caught in the technical failure as well.
Many users reported an inability to send or receive emails. Others stated they could not load their inboxes at all.
Microsoft acknowledged the technical difficulties on the social media platform X, stating it was investigating reports of users struggling to access Exchange Online mailboxes through various connection methods.
The technology firm later explained that a portion of its infrastructure was facing elevated load, which was likely contributing to the connectivity errors experienced by customers.
Engineers determined that a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable. The outage was triggered by a problem that caused the servers to fail during automated checks.
An earlier alert posted on the company website stated that Microsoft was aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce the impact. The tech giant initiated a process to restart affected servers to bring them back online.
Microsoft announced that it had paused all deployments and configuration changes as a precaution, and that a review of recent changes was underway to determine any correlation to the event.
Officials stated that the elevated load was not caused by an overall traffic increase. Instead, the sudden unavailability of a large volume of servers shifted the burden onto the remaining infrastructure.
Microsoft reported that North American Teams issues had been successfully restored earlier in the day. The company applied a validated alternative health check method to bring further affected servers back into service.
