Thousands of users face failure of Microsoft applications

Microsoft has a problem. Tens of thousands of users could not access their emails this Thursday due to an Outlook email outage.

The American group first indicated that it was investigating reports of failure "in the Americas", then specified that it had "confirmed that the problem could affect the connection to the Microsoft 365 service for all users in any region" of the world. Microsoft 365 is a service that includes applications such as Outlook and Teams.

Restarted servers

According to outage tracking site Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook shortly after 6 p.m. GMT (7 p.m. Paris). More than three hours later, around 50,000 users still said they could not access it.

“We are tirelessly looking for all avenues to limit the impact” for users, Microsoft said on X. “We have paused all deployments, are further offloading affected infrastructure, and are restarting affected servers to bring them back into service.”

Disrupted communications

The outage also disrupts certain functions of artificial intelligence assistants which connect to Microsoft accounts to read emails or consult the calendar. In addition to Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant, Claude and ChatGPT were also affected: Anthropic and OpenAI, which develop them, reported that their AI assistants were no longer able to access Microsoft 365 services.

Our information on Microsoft

The outage also disrupts communications for many utilities. Deprived of electronic and voice messaging, the University of Iowa hospital network had to ask its patients to use their online portal to contact their caregivers.