Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft programs disrupted by outage

Microsoft’s vast suite of software tools experienced widespread outages Thursday, leaving businesses and workers without critical tools for several hours.

The outage began early Thursday afternoon when workers and offices around the world began reporting problems with a number of Microsoft 365 tools and applications, including email and chat software. The problems appeared to continue on Thursday night.

Between 12:15 PM and 1:00 PM Eastern, outage tracker Down detector showed that more than 130,000 users had problems with Microsoft Outlook, the workplace messaging app Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Copilot AI assistant, and the Microsoft Store.

IN update Microsoft posted on social media around 5:00 p.m. that it was “opening up all available avenues to restore service as our actions to date have not yielded the expected relief.”

But after releasing more updates from Microsoft he said at 22:13 that his changes “do not work as expected”.

The outage affected software used by hundreds of millions of users, harming corporate offices, government agencies and individuals who rely on the company’s suite of services to send emails, write letters, conduct virtual meetings and many other daily functions.

“It shows how dependent we are on these cloud systems,” said Dr. Timothy Wood, professor of computer science at George Washington University.

The Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado said jail officials were unable to receive emails to process bond payments for detainees because of the outage. Toronto Hospital System, Unity Health, said in a statement that her staff had trouble sending and receiving emails and asked patients to call to make appointments instead. Pennsylvania State University described how Microsoft services such as its scheduler and AI agents were disrupted by the outage.

Microsoft had he said that part of its infrastructure was “experiencing increased load across multiple regions”.

The company later said it had begun redistributing traffic across its wider global infrastructure to help balance the load and that it would restart affected servers.

The outage caused waves of frustration, anger — and joy. On social media and Reddit, some embraced the lack of a system that allowed them to walk away from work, while others expressed concerns about how they might be able to work in the future.

Mr Wood said the outage could have come from a botched software update, problems with various servers or a system that checks the health of servers.

Microsoft’s servers may be working properly, but the system responsible for monitoring their maintenance may be failing, Mr. Wood said.

“The thermometer is broken,” he said, “and everyone you’re testing looks like they have a fever.