Microsoft’s efforts to restore Outlook services after a widespread global outage were not going as expected on Thursday, with the company saying it was working on alternative solutions to address capacity issues as users continued to report disruptions across its suite of applications.
“We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected. We're identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” Microsoft said in a post on X.
The outage, first reported after midday Eastern time on Thursday, affected Outlook, the company's workplace messaging platform Teams, its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot and wider Microsoft 365 services. The disruptions also affected several businesses and some government operations.
Nearly 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook on outage tracker Downdetector shortly after 1 pm EST. Although reports subsequently fell from that peak, many users said they were unable to send or receive emails or load their inboxes.
Thousands of users also reported problems with Teams and Copilot, while disruptions to Microsoft platforms were reported in several parts of Asia on Friday morning.
In Japan, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Masanao Ozaki said on Friday that the outage had affected the government's IT infrastructure. Authorities were “keeping a close eye on the developments”, he said.
In earlier updates posted on social media, Microsoft said parts of its infrastructure were “experiencing elevated load”, which was partly responsible for the connectivity errors.
The Redmond, Washington-based company said several servers had failed during automated health checks and that its alternative measures to bring those servers back online were not taking effect immediately.
“We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” the Microsoft 365 Status account had said in an earlier post on X.
Microsoft had also announced that it had successfully restored Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity problems.
(With inputs from AP and AFP)