Microsoft outage: What the company has said so far

Microsoft is currently grappling with a significant outage affecting its enterprise software products, including Microsoft 365, Teams, Outlook, Copilot 365, and Defender XDR. This issue began in the early afternoon and is ongoing as of publication. The company has been providing regular updates about the situation through social media and its website.

According to Microsoft's official status page, which also experienced a brief outage, the affected services include Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365, and Defender XDR. These services are part of Microsoft 365, which is the company's enterprise software, as opposed to its consumer products.

Initially, users in the Americas reported problems with Exchange Online mailboxes, which is a cloud-based tool that provides back-end support for Microsoft Outlook. However, by 1:07 p.m. ET, Microsoft acknowledged that the issue was more widespread, affecting multiple services and regions.

Microsoft has not yet determined the root cause of the problem but has provided a brief technical explanation. The company explained that the issue is not due to an overall increase in traffic but rather because of a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting the load onto the remaining infrastructure.

Microsoft is actively investigating the cause of the problem while working to restore the unresponsive servers. They have restarted these servers with a targeted change in place to prevent more servers from being impacted and are applying the same approach to additional affected portions of their infrastructure.