Microsoft Seeks to Restore Services After Global Outage Affecting Outlook and Teams

Microsoft said it is "working as hard as possible to explore all avenues" to mitigate the impact of a global outage that affected thousands of users of its Outlook and Teams services, as the tech giant continues its efforts to restore services following connectivity issues.

The outage, which affected Microsoft 365 services and other applications including the AI assistant Copilot, lasted for more than five hours after the company announced that its infrastructure was under "increased pressure."

Microsoft stated that it is still working on fixing the fault, noting that some servers "may stop responding again" after briefly regaining connectivity.

However, Microsoft said that the changes it is making to improve its services and address the outage are "not proceeding as expected," indicating that it is testing other solutions to resolve the problem.

The company added in its latest update on the outage that it is working to make access to its platforms available to more users without causing additional strain on its systems.

Microsoft had previously warned that some services that were brought back online might stop responding again when receiving user traffic.

According to Down Detector, a website specializing in monitoring electronic service outages, reports of issues with the Outlook service peaked globally at 138,058 reports around 18:00 GMT on Thursday evening.

Although the issue was initially reported within the United States, Microsoft said that connectivity problems could affect users "in any region of the world."