Elevated load was not driven by an increase in traffic, Microsoft says
In a further update issued at 19:50 GMT, Microsoft said it was “testing a configuration” to fix the problem, which was “causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable”. All affected servers had been restarted, the company added.
The restart followed Microsoft’s earlier explanation of what had gone wrong. The tech giant said a part of its infrastructure was experiencing “elevated load”, which was likely contributing to the connectivity errors, and it ruled out a surge in customer demand as the cause. “We determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure,” Microsoft said in a statement. The description — servers dropping out and shifting load onto the remainder — points to a failure of Microsoft’s own infrastructure rather than heavier use by users.
While the issue was originally reported in the US, Microsoft said the connectivity problems could affect users “in any region”.
Monitoring website Downdetector showed a spike in UK users reporting issues with Microsoft products at around 18:30 GMT on Thursday evening. Similarly for the US, the monitoring site suggested there had been over 131,000 reports of Microsoft Outlook problems at 18:15 GMT.
The reports accumulated through Thursday, when Microsoft said it was working to tackle “connectivity problems” after users worldwide reported outages on the company’s services. Services including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft’s AI software Copilot were affected.
Microsoft did not say in the statements quoted by the BBC how many users or which regions were affected, or when full service would be restored.
Microsoft said Teams, Outlook and Copilot were among the services affected. Copilot is Microsoft’s AI software.