Microsoft outage: Company can’t pinpoint cause, disruptions to Outlook, Teams continue

Microsoft said on Friday that it is still working to pinpoint the cause of a global outage that has disrupted Outlook, Teams and other workplace services for a second day, including for users in India. The company said it is not aware of any malicious activity behind the incident.

Here's all you should know.

Cause still unknown


Microsoft’s service health page showed “service degradation” for business, enterprise and consumer customers as of 11.16 am India time on Friday. The company said it was pursuing multiple workstreams to identify the underlying cause of a traffic influx and to recover its backend servers. “As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident,” it said. It added that full root-cause details will come in a post-incident report once the issue is mitigated.

What happened?

The company has said in a statement that the strain on its systems came not from a rise in traffic but from a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which pushed the load onto the remaining infrastructure. Overnight, it began reverting a recent network configuration change that correlates with the start of the problems, though that is not a confirmed root cause.

"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking (place) as expected," Microsoft said on X. "We're identifying alternate (sic) workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity," the tech giant added, without saying when service was expected to be fully restored.

What’s affected

Microsoft 365 features that depend on Exchange Online and email are affected, while those that don’t are functional. Users may be unable to reach their mailboxes through Outlook on the web and desktop, and email delivery may be delayed. Copilot Chat may fail to load or respond, and Copilot may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar and files.

On Teams, core functions such as joining calls and meetings, group chats and channel messages are working. Calendar tasks such as scheduling and viewing meetings may fail.

Impact in India

Indian users began reporting problems around 11 pm Thursday, according to Downdetector. Outage reports eased overnight but spiked again after 6 am on Friday.

Airline IndiGo said its email support was affected and it may not receive customers’ emails. Other support channels remain available, it said in a post on X.

The company will publish a post-incident report and users are to check the Microsoft 365 admin center for updates.