Microsoft outage disrupts Teams, Outlook and Copilot as efforts fail to ensure sustained service restoration

Microsoft is facing a major global outage that has reportedly affected tens of thousands of users, disrupting several of its services, including Teams, Outlook and its artificial intelligence tool Copilot.

The company is working to bring the affected services back online, but its recovery efforts have run into difficulties, with some of the measures introduced earlier failing to produce the expected results.

In its latest update, Microsoft said it was observing partial recovery across regions where it had applied adjustments. However, it added that the actions taken so far were not resulting in sustained recovery.


Microsoft had earlier said that it had been monitoring changes made to improve service availability but found that they were "not taking as expected". The company is now exploring alternative ways to increase infrastructure capacity as it deals with persistent imbalances in traffic management.

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It is also making improvements to infrastructure capacity wherever possible to help manage traffic in regions where services are gradually being restored.

Microsoft acknowledged that the recovery process remains challenging and said it was looking at other measures to address the capacity shortfall. Further remedial steps will be rolled out once the changes already introduced have been confirmed as stable, it added.

The disruption has affected several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and Copilot, with users reporting connectivity issues and difficulties accessing tools used for everyday work.

According to outage-monitoring platform Downdetector, reports of problems with Outlook peaked at nearly 140,000 globally around 18:00 GMT on Thursday.

The outage has caused problems for businesses and organisations that depend on Microsoft's services for email, workplace communication and collaboration.

Microsoft has yet to provide a timeline for when all affected services will be fully restored.

(With inputs from agencies)