Business|Microsoft Programs Disrupted by Widespread Outage

Microsoft reported an outage involving its sprawling set of software tools early Thursday afternoon. The outage, which the company said could affect business and consumer users in “any region,” has continued for at least four hours, customers reported.

Between 12:15 and 1 p.m. Eastern, the outage tracker Downdetector showed that more than 130,000 users were experiencing problems with Microsoft Outlook, which is used for email, calendars and other online tasks.

Similar spikes in outages were reported with Microsoft 365, the workplace messaging app Microsoft Teams, the A.I. assistant Microsoft Copilot and the Microsoft Store, Downdetector’s data showed.

Just after 6 p.m., Microsoft said on social media that it was “returning a portion of affected servers to the service,” though users were still reporting outages on Downdetector.

Earlier, Microsoft said that part of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load.”

The company said in a social media post around 1 p.m. that “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.”

The company said later that it had begin redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load, and that it was restarting affected servers to return them to service.

“We’re working to safely return them to service,” Microsoft added in an update.