Microsoft Works To Address Massive Outage Across Copilot, Teams

Microsoft posted at 1:12 p.m. Pacific Time that it was ‘aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.’

Microsoft is working to mitigate a widespread outage that appears to impact its Microsoft Teams collaboration application, Copilot 365 artificial intelligence tool and other popular products and services by the tech giant.

The Redmond, Wash.-based vendor published its first notice about issues on the X social media network at 7:40 a.m. Pacific to say it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues when accessing or using Microsoft Teams functionality in North America,” later posting that customer impact fully restored at 9:09 a.m.

Then at 9:54 a.m., Microsoft published on X a notice that it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” with Exchange appearing to suffer a separate issue from the Teams one.

Microsoft posted at 11:12 a.m. that it was “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”

“We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service,” Microsoft published.

[RELATED: Microsoft 365 Nine-Hour-Plus Outage: 5 Things To Know]

A Microsoft spokesperon said in a statement: “We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online. We appreciate our customer’s [sic] patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible."

At 11:31 a.m., Microsoft said it had determined that “the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”

“We're working to safely return them to service,” the vendor posted to X.

Microsoft’s Service Health Status page was down temporarily when a CRN reporter checked it Thursday morning. Once live again, the page showed that Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR might be impacted for users.

The status page also showed service degradation in Microsoft 365 Consumer products, noting that “users may be unable to access or perform several actions in Microsoft 365 services such as Outlook.com and OneDrive.”

“We're investigating an issue that may be preventing access to Microsoft 365 services such as Outlook.com and OneDrive,” according to the message. “This could prevent Outlook email or OneDrive access and could also limit the features or functions available. We're [determining] additional services and feature which may be affected.”

At 10:07 a.m. Pacific, Microsoft said on X that “the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region” and noted at 10:35 a.m. that it had “determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.” At 10:48 a.m., Microsoft began “redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load,” it posted on X.

Downdetector Reports Pour In

Online outage tracker Downdetector showed multiple reports by users of various Microsoft products reporting that products and services were down. There could be overlap in the users experiencing outages with each of the Microsoft products and services.

Among those reports:

• Outage reports for the Outlook email service hit a peak at 10:11 a.m. Pacific with about 130,000 reports and logged about 93,000 reports at 10:56 a.m.
• Outage reports for the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications hit a peak at 10:10 a.m. of about 46,000 reports and logged 38,000 reports at 10:55 a.m.
• The Microsoft Store peaked at about 11,000 outage reports at 10:27 a.m. and logged 6,000 reports at 10:57 a.m.
• The Copilot artificial intelligence assistant outage reports peaked at about 6,000 at 10:26 a.m. and logged about 4,000 reports at 10:56 a.m.
• Microsoft’s Teams collaboration application saw a peak of about 5,000 outage reports at 10:48 a.m. and logged about 4,000 reports at 11:03 a.m.
• Microsoft’s Azure cloud product peaked at 875 reports at 10:20 a.m. and logged 733 outage reports at 11:05 a.m.
• Microsoft’s OneDrive storage service peaked at 627 reports at 11:02 a.m.
• About 500 Microsoft Account outage reports came in at peak of 10:20 a.m., with Downdetector logging 414 reports at 11:05 a.m.
• Microsoft’s Power BI business intelligence and data analytics tool peaked with 55 reports at 10:47 a.m. and logged 47 reports at 11:02 a.m.

Downdetector users reported outages with other products Thursday. Amazon Web Services, for example, saw outage reports peak at about 1,000 reports at 10:52 a.m. Pacific. Google's Gmail email service logged 1,000 outage reports at 11:40 a.m.

Kelly Yeh, president of Chantilly, Va.-based Microsoft solution provider Phalanx Technology Group, told CRN in an interview that although no one expects perfection with the push to cloud-hosted platforms like Microsoft 365, redundancy and failover should kick in for unexpected outages at prime business hours.

“This is affecting many clients and partners, so I hope it gets resolved soon,” Yeh said.

Corey Kirkendoll, president and CEO of Plano, Texas-based Microsoft solution provider 5K Technical Services, told CRN in an interview that customers are feeling frustrated by the outage.

He said he is staying in contact with all of them to keep them updated on the news from Microsoft on restoration. He also said the email continuity capabilities of another vendor, OpenText, have helped during the outage.

“Almost all of our customers are affected and calls are rolling in,” he said. He’s “calling every last one of them, texting them, informing them of the outage,” he said.