Widespread Technical Outage Hits Microsoft Services Worldwide

Microsoft’s cloud services experienced a widespread technical outage today, affecting tens of thousands of users’ access to several essential platforms and applications worldwide, particularly the Outlook email service and the Microsoft 365 suite of applications.

Downdetector, which specialises in monitoring outages affecting websites and digital services, recorded tens of thousands of reports from users who experienced difficulties signing in and disruptions to sending and receiving emails. Users also reported partial outages affecting access to the Microsoft Store and the Microsoft Copilot artificial intelligence assistant.

Microsoft confirmed through its official service-status accounts that it had opened an urgent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the outage. The company said initial checks revealed connection errors within part of the infrastructure responsible for processing user sign-in requests in Exchange Online.

The company said the outage initially appeared mainly in the Americas before its effects spread to other regions worldwide. Its engineering teams are working to reroute traffic and repair the fault to restore the service fully as quickly as possible, just hours after Microsoft announced that it had resolved a separate technical outage affecting Microsoft Teams earlier in the day.

Microsoft explained that the disruption was not caused by a sudden increase in traffic. Instead, a large number of servers unexpectedly went out of service after failing automated health checks, placing enormous pressure on the remaining cloud infrastructure and causing connection errors across several regions worldwide.

Microsoft said it had taken a series of urgent measures to contain the disruption and restore services. These included pausing all software updates and technical deployments as a precaution while reviewing whether recent changes had caused the problem, rerouting and redistributing traffic across its wider global infrastructure to reduce the load on affected servers, restarting all affected servers, and testing configuration changes to return them safely to service.

Source: QNA

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