Microsoft Global Outage Disrupts Outlook, Teams and Copilot 365 – And The Company Scrambles To Restore Servers

Microsoft said its servers were experiencing elevated loads, causing an outage.

• Some affected services were restored around 7 pm ET, Microsoft said.
• Some online users also pointed to issues in AWS services, but Amazon denied it.
• Retail sentiment for MSFT flipped to ‘bearish’ as some traders said that the hours-long outage was concerning.

Microsoft’s workplace services Outlook, Teams and Copilot were down for several hours on Thursday, causing widespread disruption of work for users across regions.

In a series of updates on its status page and X handle, Microsoft said its servers were experiencing “elevated load across multiple regions,” likely contributing to the connectivity errors, and that it was trying to distribute loads across other sites and pausing deployment work.

“We determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure,” according to a post on the Microsoft 365 Status’ X handle, adding that Microsoft did a full reset of all affected servers and that the fault appeared to be with a specific component that’s responsible for processing server health.

Microsoft Says Some Services Restored

Around 7 pm ET, Microsoft said that some unresponsive servers were coming online, although they may still malfunction.

“We’re seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure and recover server availability in an isolated manner. We’re actively monitoring the performance of these portions of infrastructure to verify stability, which we suspect will support improved availability as these actions are subsequently expanded more broadly,” the company said in its latest status update at 8 pm ET.

Some users also reported an outage with Amazon’s cloud services, but AWC denied it. “AWS services have been operating normally, however, an unrelated disruption elsewhere on the internet is prompting some inaccurate news reports,” it said in an X post.

Microsoft Outlook had over 1,000 outage reports on outage tracker Downdetector as of the last check. The reports peaked around 1:30 pm ET. Microsoft 356 and Teams also had outage reports as of the last check.

MSFT Stock, Other Catalysts

Microsoft shares fell 0.2% in overnight trading late Thursday. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment flipped to ‘bearish’ from ‘bullish’ as several traders complained about the outage.

“Dang, looks like I’m taking off the rest of the day since Microsoft shit the bed. Our entire company is currently offline. No teams, no email, no co-pilot, nothing,” said a trader.

Another wrote: “$MST This should be down several percent already. Our entire business has been frozen for hours now.” A third said, “I am starting to wonder if this Microsoft problem we are having today since lunch time is bigger than what everyone thought as a simple glitch.

In other catalysts for the company, semiconductor firm Cerebras said on Thursday that it will supply chips to Microsoft and in turn will use Microsoft’s cloud services.

As of the last close, MSFT stock is up 8.8%.

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