Microsoft ‘restarting’ as outage impacts global users, with Outlook and Teams affected

Microsoft says it is “aggressively pursuing all pathways” after users reported issues accessing its 365 suite of programs, including Outlook and Teams.

On Friday morning, outage website Down Detector showed a spike in Microsoft 365 problems, with almost 50,000 reports of issues affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive.

Posting on X, Microsoft said it was investigating “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods”.

A service degradation alert on Microsoft’s site said it was “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact” and said it was “restarting affected servers to return them to service”.

“As a precaution, we’ve paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event.

“We’ve determined that the elevated load isn’t driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure.

“We’re investigating what’s causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.”

More details soon …