Microsoft scrambles to restart servers as 365 outage hits Outlook and Teams

Microsoft is racing to bring its own servers back online after a global outage knocked out chunks of its 365 suite. The company says it is "restarting affected servers to return them to service" and "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," according to a service degradation alert on its site.

Down Detector logged a spike of nearly 130,000 reports as users lost access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, plus enterprise tools like SharePoint and OneDrive. The AI assistant Copilot was caught in the blast too.

Reports have dropped off from that peak, but plenty of people still couldn't send or receive email or load their inboxes at all. Microsoft said on X it was investigating users hitting issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes "through multiple connection methods."

The company traced the mess to a portion of its infrastructure running under "elevated load" — which it said was "likely contributing to the connectivity errors." That load wasn't caused by a traffic surge. Instead, a large number of servers went "unexpectedly unavailable" after failing during automated checks, pushing the weight onto whatever hardware was still standing.

Microsoft has paused all deployments and configuration changes while it trawls recent tweaks for anything that lines up with the failure. It says it is still digging into why the servers are dropping out while it works to return them safely. Earlier in the day, the company said it had "successfully restored" the Teams problems in North America, though some users kept reporting connectivity trouble.