Microsoft outage: Company issues update as services face global disruption
Microsoft says its fix for the global Microsoft 365 outage is finally starting to work. More than 12 hours after users around the world lost access to Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 services, the company said on Friday that it is seeing "positive results" for server stability. A full recovery, however, is still some way off.In its latest update on the Microsoft 365 service health page, the company said it has applied an "upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch" to a portion of its infrastructure.
Put simply, the fix targets how users connect to Microsoft's servers. Microsoft said it will keep monitoring the patch and is working to roll it out to servers supporting active regions as they come back online. There is still no timeline for when services will be fully restored.Outlook and Teams stayed down because Microsoft's servers kept failing health checksThe update comes shortly after Microsoft admitted it had seen only "marginal success" and was adding virtual machines to expand capacity.The trouble began around 11:30 pm IST on Thursday, when users in the Americas started reporting that they could not reach their Exchange Online mailboxes.
Microsoft soon confirmed that users in any region could be affected. Impacted services include Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Defender XDR. On the consumer side, Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do and Microsoft 365 for the web have also seen problems.Microsoft's early updates pointed to elevated load on its infrastructure.
It later clarified that traffic had not spiked. Instead, a number of servers had gone offline unexpectedly, putting pressure on the ones still running. The servers were failing automated health checks, and some that engineers brought back went unresponsive again as soon as traffic hit them. At one point, the company conceded its fix was "not taking as expected". It paused all deployments, moved traffic to other routes and blocked certain types of traffic in some regions to ease the load.Microsoft says the outage is not a cyberattackMicrosoft has repeatedly said there is no sign of a hack behind the disruption.
"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident," the company said in its status update. Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna also said on social media that there was "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity".The company has promised a Post-Incident Report once the issue is resolved. It will detail the root cause and the repairs Microsoft plans to make so the same failure does not repeat.Microsoft 365 outage disrupts airlines, AI companies and governments worldwideThe fallout has gone well beyond office inboxes.
In India, IndiGo and Akasa Air said their email support services were affected. AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic reported issues with Microsoft connectors.In Japan, government email services went down, and digital minister Toshiharu Furukawa said officials would use text messages as a stopgap. Economy minister Ryosei Akazawa said the disruption had a "major impact" on the country.Australia's spy agency and federal police were among the organisations hit there, and a risk advisory firm estimated the cost to Australian businesses at billions of dollars.
In the UK, several police forces asked people to call 101 instead of filing crime reports online, while schools told parents to phone in absences. Traders in Singapore and fund managers in Taiwan also fell back on phone calls and WhatsApp to confirm deals.For now, users may still have trouble connecting to Microsoft 365 apps, and recovery is likely to be gradual as clients reconnect.
IT admins can follow updates under MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, or on status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is unavailable.The bigger question is whether the patched servers hold up once they take on full traffic. That is exactly where Microsoft's earlier attempts fell apart overnight.Your child uses AI every day. But do they understand it? Find out in the TOI AI Masterclass.
