Microsoft reported an outage involving its sprawling set of software tools early Thursday afternoon. The outage has continued for at least three hours, users reported.
Between 12:15 and 1 p.m. Eastern, the outage tracker Downdetector showed that more than 130,000 users were experiencing problems with Microsoft Outlook, which is used for email, calendars and other online tasks. Similar spikes in outages were reported with Microsoft 365, the workplace messaging app Microsoft Teams, the A.I. assistant Microsoft Copilot and the Microsoft Store, Downdetector’s data showed.
By 4 p.m. the number of users reporting issues with Microsoft’s applications had been cut nearly in half.
Microsoft said initially that part of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load.”
Later the company said in a social media post that “we determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure.”
“We’re working to safely return them to service,” Microsoft added in the post.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
