Microsoft is investigating a widespread outage affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot, as users report connectivity problems in regions around the world. BleepingComputer received numerous user reports of access problems, and Downdetector showed complaints rising Thursday afternoon across Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, Azure, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Store.
Scope and timeline
In a Microsoft 365 admin center advisory tracked as MO1550821, Microsoft confirmed that customers may be unable to connect to Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft Defender XDR. The company says the incident began at 1:26 PM ET, after it had earlier begun investigating Exchange Online mailbox connectivity problems in the Americas. Although the initial reports came from the Americas, Microsoft later confirmed that users in any region could be affected.
Root cause and response
Microsoft first attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure load across multiple regions. It later determined that the load was not caused by increased traffic, but by a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which strained the remaining infrastructure. To respond, the company said it has paused all deployments, redistributed connection traffic across its global infrastructure, moved additional traffic away from affected systems, and is restarting affected servers to restore capacity.
Related Teams incident
The outage followed a separate Microsoft Teams incident earlier that day, tracked as TM1550488, which affected users in North and South America between 9:45 AM and 10:53 AM ET. That incident caused delays or failures when sending messages, errors creating or updating conversations, and problems retrieving chat messages. Microsoft attributed it to resource contention that drove up resource utilization and prevented normal processing of messaging requests, and says that incident is fully resolved. Microsoft has not said whether the two incidents are related.
Recovery status
In a later update, Microsoft reported limited recovery after returning some affected servers to service. The company said a core process on the affected servers had become overwhelmed, causing a loss of capacity, and that it was evaluating whether reverting a small number of recent configuration updates could speed recovery. Microsoft warned that users may see a gradual recovery as applications reconnect, and it has not yet confirmed when services will be fully restored.
Administrators affected by the disruption should monitor the Microsoft 365 admin center for updates on MO1550821 and expect residual connection issues as services stabilize.
