Microsoft took steps to address global connectivity problems on Thursday after widespread outages impacted major services, including Outlook, Teams, and its AI platform Copilot.
Monitoring site Downdetector recorded a sharp rise in user-reported problems across multiple regions. In the United States, reports of Microsoft Outlook failures surpassed 131,000 at 18:15 GMT, followed by a surge in complaints from UK users around 18:30 GMT on Thursday evening.
The technology company initially noted that part of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load, which likely led to the connection errors. Although the disruption was first noted in the US, Microsoft cautioned that users in any region could be affected.
Clarifying the operational strain, Microsoft stated that the elevated load was not caused by an surge in user traffic, but rather by a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable and putting extra strain on the remaining infrastructure.
In a technical update issued at 19:50 GMT, the company announced that all affected servers had been restarted. Microsoft explained that it was testing a configuration to resolve the underlying bug, which had caused servers to fail automated health checks and drop offline.
