Microsoft struggling to restore service as global outage affects Outlook and Teams

Microsoft is struggling to fix a global outage of its service that is reportedly affecting tens of thousands of users.

Services including Teams, Outlook and Microsoft's AI software Copilot have been affected by "connectivity problems".

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," the company wrote on X.

Reports of problems with Outlook peaked globally at nearly 140,000 around 18:00 GMT on Thursday, according to monitoring website Downdetector.

The company said it had been able to restore part of its service, but about an hour later, it gave another update saying those servers "can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic".

While the issue was originally reported in the US, Microsoft said users "in any region" may be affected.

The company said it had found some of its infrastructure was "experiencing elevated load across multiple regions" which was "likely contributing to the connectivity errors".

It later gave an update that the extra load was probably caused by several servers being "unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure".

AI companies feel the impact

OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected.

Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

Microsoft last month reported an outage of its Azure cloud platform that impacted the tech giant's suite of productivity software, and a range of industries worldwide.

Electric truck maker Workhorse Group, which was expected to report third-quarter results on 12 November, rescheduled it to 16 November citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage.