New Delhi: Thousands of users across multiple countries faced difficulties accessing Microsoft’s productivity and communication platforms after a major technical disruption affected Microsoft 365 and several connected services for more than nine hours.
The company struggled to restore normal operations as successive recovery attempts failed to bring all affected services back online.
The disruption affected a wide range of Microsoft products, including Outlook, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint and OneDrive. The company’s AI assistant, Copilot, also experienced problems, while certain services connecting external AI platforms to Microsoft 365 were disrupted.
Microsoft has said there was no indication that malicious activity or a cyberattack was responsible for the incident. A company spokesperson said the organisation “had no indication of a cyber-attack”.
Nearly 130,000 reports were recorded across 74 countries, highlighting the widespread impact on individual users and organisations relying on Microsoft’s cloud-based services, according to guardian.com.
Investigations pointed towards a possible configuration-related problem affecting the servers that support Microsoft 365. Microsoft identified an issue involving server settings that may have disrupted normal operations and triggered failures during automated checks, leaving several servers unexpectedly unavailable.
The company attempted multiple recovery measures, including reversing recent updates and controlling the amount of traffic directed towards the affected infrastructure. It also worked to restore unavailable servers and redirect users through alternative network routes.
Microsoft Executive Vice-President of Copilot Charles Lamanna acknowledged the disruption in a post on X and said the company would provide further information as its investigation progressed.
“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” Lamanna said.
“We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity,” he added.
Before identifying the server availability problems, Microsoft had reported unusually high demand on part of its infrastructure. The company said a portion of its systems was “experiencing elevated load”, which was likely contributing to connectivity errors.
Microsoft subsequently focused on stabilising the servers that had been restored and bringing the remaining affected systems back into operation. It confirmed that the recovered servers had remained stable and that traffic was being redirected through alternative routes wherever possible.
The company also cautioned that service restoration would not necessarily be immediate for every user, as applications and devices would need to reconnect once capacity became available.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” the company said in a statement.
The impact was not limited to Microsoft’s own product ecosystem. Connectors supporting OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI services also encountered problems because of the disruption to Microsoft infrastructure.
OpenAI said it was investigating failures involving its Microsoft connectors, which could prevent new connections and affect the functioning of certain tools. Anthropic separately reported that an issue with an upstream provider was disrupting its Microsoft 365 connector.
The incident comes shortly after another major disruption involving Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform last month. That outage affected Microsoft’s productivity software and services used across several industries worldwide.
As restoration work continued, Microsoft was also examining whether reversing a limited number of recently introduced configuration changes could help bring the remaining systems back online faster. The company said it was “assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery”.
