A widespread technical outage affected Microsoft’s cloud services overnight, disrupting Microsoft Outlook, Teams and several Microsoft 365 applications for users in different parts of the world. At the height of the disruption, outage-tracking platform Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports globally, with users reporting difficulties accessing inboxes, sending or receiving emails and connecting to workplace collaboration tools.

The disruption also affected several interconnected services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot. Some third-party services that rely on Microsoft enterprise connections reportedly experienced intermittent tool failures. Government departments, educational institutions and businesses in various regions also reported interruptions to their workflows because of difficulties accessing email and cloud-based files.

According to Microsoft service health updates associated with incident EX1550543, connectivity problems occurred after a large number of servers became unavailable following failed automated health checks. The resulting reduction in available capacity placed additional traffic on the remaining infrastructure, contributing to timeouts and connection failures. Microsoft’s updates indicated that the incident was related to an internal service issue rather than a malicious cyberattack.

To address the disruption, Microsoft engineers paused software deployments, rolled back recent server configuration changes and began rerouting network traffic through alternative pathways. The company later reported that some affected servers had been restarted and returned to service, while recovery continued across the affected regions.

Service restoration and regional impact figures remained subject to further updates as Microsoft continued monitoring the stability of its network and cloud services.

Source Attribution: Microsoft 365 Service Health Status (Incident EX1550543), Downdetector telemetry and international wire reports.