Microsoft services, such as Outlook, Teams and CoPilot, have been disrupted for hours. Microsoft is experiencing problems with a number of servers, causing global disruption, the American company confirmed.
Various companies and government agencies in the United States started noticing problems with Microsoft’s services on Thursday. While it was evening in Belgium, the working day was in full swing in the US. At around 19:00 Belgian time, the Downdetector platform that tracks outages recorded more than 130,000 reports of problems with the Outlook email service.
However, the problems extend beyond just email: Teams and the AI assistant Copilot are also difficult or impossible to access. Additionally, there are also reports concerning Microsoft 365, a widely used suite of programmes and online services that includes Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as SharePoint and OneDrive, where information is shared and stored in the cloud.
AI assistants Claude and ChatGPT have also been affected, as Anthropic and OpenAI reported that their AI assistants no longer had access to Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft soon announced that a number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable as part of the infrastructure was “overloaded," causing connections to falter.
The company initially investigated issues in North and South America, but reports soon also emerged from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India and other countries in Asia and the Pacific region.
In subsequent updates, Microsoft stated that the problem could affect connections to Microsoft 365 services for all users in every region worldwide.
The company said it was trying to limit the impact by rerouting data traffic away from the affected servers.
Later, the company said it had identified processes that appeared to be causing the problems and had managed to bring some of the affected servers back online. However, Microsoft then found that those servers could seize up again as soon as incoming data traffic resumed.
The company eventually acknowledged that the measures it had taken to resolve the outage were “not working as expected."
It is not clear what caused the disruption, or how long it will last.
“At this stage, we can confirm that there are no indications that this is the result of malicious intent,” Microsoft has stated.
