Users report being unable to access Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 services; Microsoft says many of its servers became unexpectedly unavailable (Anna Washenko/Engadget)

Microsoft is currently experiencing a widespread outage that affects numerous of its services, including Outlook, Teams, Copilot, OneDrive, and Azure. Users across the globe are reporting difficulties accessing these platforms, with over ten thousand outage reports logged on DownDetector. Similar issues are also surfacing with other major tech companies, including Google, Steam, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The root cause of this outage remains unknown, but Microsoft has acknowledged the problem on its official Microsoft 365 status Twitter account. The company's Service Health Status page confirms that Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365, and Microsoft Defender XDR are currently down. The statement reads: "We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.

As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event."

The company has determined that the high load causing the issue is not due to an overall increase in traffic, but rather a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is diverting traffic to the remaining infrastructure. Microsoft is actively investigating the cause of the server unavailability while working to safely restore them to service. Given the widespread nature of the outage, it appears restoration may take some time. The story will be updated with further developments.