Microsoft gives initial explanation for outage; says ‘servers were unexpectedly unavailable’

A widespread outage has engulfed Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, leaving countless users unable to access their email accounts and other services. As of the early hours of the morning, over 120,000 users reported difficulties on the independent tracking site Downdetector, with many unable to send or receive emails or experiencing significant delays.

The company's Service Health Status page confirmed that users might be unable to connect to multiple 365 services, such as Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365, and Defender XDR. Microsoft has identified that the surge in demand is not due to an overall increase in traffic but rather a significant number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, causing an imbalance in the remaining infrastructure.

The tech giant is actively investigating the cause of the server issues and working to return them to service safely. All deployments have been paused as Microsoft redirects traffic away from the affected infrastructure and restarts servers to restore normal operations. Additionally, OpenAI and Anthropic have each reported issues with Microsoft connectors, with OpenAI stating that new connections may be broken and tools may not function as expected, while Anthropic identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.