Disruption: Hours-long outage at Microsoft affects Outlook and Teams

New York. A more than five-hour outage of services such as Outlook and Teams affected tens of thousands of Microsoft users on Thursday (local time). The disruption also affected interfaces to the AI ​​services of OpenAI and Anthropic. The company announced that several servers were unexpectedly unavailable due to the high load. This is not due to an increase in data traffic.

The software giant initially reported problems with Exchange mailboxes in the USA. The company then also said that the disruption could affect users of the Microsoft 365 cloud service worldwide.

Microsoft redirected data flows to alternative routes and saw systems begin to recover in the evening. Microsoft products such as Outlook, Teams and the AI ​​assistant Copilot are among the most widely used software solutions in companies, authorities and educational institutions worldwide.

Citing the outage, Workhorse Group, a manufacturer of trucks and buses, said it would postpone the release of its financial results, originally scheduled for Thursday, to Monday. School districts, universities and hospitals also warned that their communication options could be limited.