Microsoft Outage Today: US Tech giant Microsoft has faced an unprecedented global outage as its workplace services, including Outlook and Teams, were affected in several countries, including India. Indian users began flagging problems around 11 pm on Thursday, according to the outage-tracking website Downdetector. The number of outage reports on the website moderated overnight; they spiked again after 6 am on Friday.
More than 130,000 users on outage tracker Downdetector reported problems accessing Outlook earlier on Thursday, although new reports have since fallen from that peak.
The company said on X that the strain on its systems came not from a rise in traffic but from "a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable"
What Is The Status Now?
Microsoft's service health page showed "service degradation" for Microsoft 365 business and enterprise customers as well as its consumer products, as of an update at 11.16 am India time on Friday.
"We’re seeing positive results for service stability and increased capacity as a result of our latest traffic optimization actions. We're implementing these actions more broadly across affected regions as we seek to attain persistent recovery. A more comprehensive update can be found at MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you," Microsoft 365 Status said on X at 1.14 pm IST.
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What Went Wrong
According to https://learn.microsoft.com, Microsoft has identified that the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. Microsoft is currently restarting and repairing impacted portions of the infrastructure to restore capacity, it added.
Additionally, they are investigating an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic and evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternative infrastructure to expedite recovery. The incident is currently classified as Service Degradation, and Microsoft is actively investigating and working to mitigate the issue, it added.
"As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we're reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimise routing. This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability," Microsoft said.
Why Is The Restoration Taking So Much Time?
Microsoft's global restoration of its services is taking a long time due to a cascading server overload cycle triggered by internal configuration problems rather than a cyberattack. An initial misconfiguration caused a subset of servers to drop offline. This forced the remaining active servers to absorb the sudden, extra workload, overwhelming them and causing them to crash as well. The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to pinpoint the underlying cause of a traffic influx and to recover its backend servers.
Is There Malicious Activity Behind Outage?
Microsoft said it was still working to pinpoint the cause and is not aware of any malicious activity behind it.
"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident," it said, adding that full details of the root cause would be shared in a post-incident report once the issue is mitigated.
Which Services Are Affected?
Microsoft 365: Features of Microsoft 365 services that interact with Exchange Online and email are affected, while those that do not depend on it remain functional.
Outlook: Users may be unable to access their mailboxes through Outlook on the web and Outlook desktop, and email delivery may be delayed, Microsoft said.
Microsoft Copilot: Users may also be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files.
Teams: On Teams, most core functions such as joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages are not affected, but calendar-related tasks such as scheduling and viewing meetings may fail.
SharePoint Online & OneDrive: Users are facing Cloud storage, file-sharing, and document access issues.
OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services: The outage also hit connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services.
(With Agencies Inputs)
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