Microsoft outage hits Teams, Outlook and Copilot worldwide

Microsoft is battling a global outage that knocked Teams, Outlook and its AI assistant Copilot offline for users on Thursday. The company blamed part of its infrastructure running under what it called elevated load, which it said was likely fuelling the connectivity errors.

The trouble surfaced in the US first, but Microsoft warned the connectivity problems could hit users in any region. Outage tracker Downdetector logged a spike in UK reports around 18:30 GMT, while in the US it pointed to more than 131,000 reports of Outlook problems at 18:15 GMT.

In a statement, Microsoft said the load wasn't caused by more people piling in. Instead, a number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, straining the infrastructure still standing.

By 19:50 GMT the company said it was testing a configuration to fix the fault, which it said was causing servers to fail automated health checks and drop offline. All the affected servers have since been restarted, Microsoft added.

The company has not said how many users were hit or whether the fix has fully cleared the disruption.