WORLDTECHMicrosoft 365 outage hits about 130,000 users as servers are restored
Microsoft has begun bringing affected infrastructure back online after a widespread outage disrupted access to Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications. Reports collected by Downdetector put the number of affected users at nearly 130,000 worldwide.
What users experienced
The disruption reached a broad set of Microsoft 365 services, including email in Outlook and collaboration through Teams. According to reports collected by Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users globally were affected at the height of the problem.
As recovery efforts progressed on Thursday, some users continued to report connectivity problems, indicating that restoration was not yet complete for everyone.
Cause points to infrastructure and health checks
Microsoft traced the disruption to an infrastructure problem in which several servers became unexpectedly unavailable. The company now believes that these unavailable servers, together with problems in its automated health checks, contributed to the incident.
Microsoft describes Redmond-based software development as the core of its business, and its products and services include Microsoft Servers, the infrastructure that the outage affected.
Open questions
- Will all affected users regain full access to Microsoft 365 services?
- How exactly did the automated health checks fail to detect the server problems?