Microsoft Has Officially Apologized for Yesterday’s Outages.
If you’re experiencing issues accessing services like Microsoft Teams or Outlook, you’re not alone. Early Thursday afternoon, many of Microsoft’s largest apps and services experienced outages. According to Downdetector , which tracks user reports of website and platform issues, issues were observed in Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, Teams, and OneDrive. By Friday afternoon, Microsoft had restored service for many users and officially apologized for the outages.
Which Microsoft services were affected by the outages?
When I first published this article on Thursday, I couldn’t even load the Microsoft 365 status page. (I’ve reported many service outages, but I can’t recall a time when the service status page was also down.) Even as of Friday afternoon, the page still shows the message “Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise) service quality is degrading,” and Microsoft says the following services may be affected: Exchange Online, Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft 365 Apps, Microsoft 365 Apps admin center, Microsoft 365 Education, Microsoft Copilot 365, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft To Do, Power BI, SharePoint Online, Universal Print, and Windows 365.
Looking specifically at Outlook , Microsoft’s email service received hundreds of thousands of messages from users on Thursday afternoon, indicating a serious issue somewhere in Microsoft’s data processing system. The number of messages dropped slightly throughout the day, but Downdetector still showed over 50,000 messages every 15 minutes when I checked on Thursday afternoon.
What caused these Microsoft outages?
While the root cause of the issue remained a mystery throughout Thursday’s outage, Microsoft confirmed its existence in an apology on Friday . According to the company, “This was a technical issue unrelated to cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, or agents. The incident was caused by an issue during a previous network capacity upgrade that manifested itself after recent network changes. We have resolved the underlying issue and are continuing to restore service to the remaining customers and regions.”
Microsoft states that it “deeply regrets” the inconvenience caused to its customers and partners. According to company representatives, the bug fixes were implemented more slowly than expected because the company wanted to restore service gradually, assessing stability at each stage. A full report on the impact of the incident will be published after the investigation is complete.
During the outage, the company confirmed that some of its infrastructure was experiencing increased load, which it said likely contributed to the issues. Microsoft then announced that it was pausing all deployments and rerouting traffic from the affected infrastructure, and also discovered that several of its servers had unexpectedly become unavailable after failing health checks. The company suspected that a specific component responsible for processing server health data may be the cause of the system health check failures. Microsoft reported that an alternative method for verifying service health successfully restarted some of the affected servers. The company is now actively restarting and verifying the health of the affected servers to return them to a working state.
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