GUWAHATI: Microsoft has reported progress in restoring its services following a major global outage that disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications, affecting users and businesses across 74 countries.
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In its latest update, the company said it was seeing positive results from efforts to restart affected services and servers. Microsoft added that it would expand its recovery measures as it confirmed the stability of the changes implemented.
Downdetector recorded a peak of around 2 lakh reports of problems across Microsoft services shortly after 1 PM New York time. Separately, nearly 1.3 lakh reports of Microsoft 365-related issues were recorded across 74 countries, affecting access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive.
Thousands of users also reported difficulties accessing Microsoft's workplace messaging platform Teams and its artificial intelligence assistant Copilot. Although the number of fresh complaints later declined for services such as Outlook and Copilot, this did not necessarily indicate that the services had been fully restored.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company had "no indication of a cyber-attack", indicating that the disruption was not believed to be linked to a security breach.
The company suggested that the outage may have been caused by problems with settings applied to servers responsible for keeping Microsoft 365 services operational.
Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing "elevated load", which was likely contributing to connectivity errors. The company also identified several servers that had become "unexpectedly unavailable" after failing automated checks.
In an update posted on X, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of users facing difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods.
Exchange services, which support Outlook's email functionality, were among the worst affected. The disruption also had a knock-on effect on other Microsoft products that rely on these services, while Teams chats and meetings were reported to be comparatively less affected.
Over several hours, Microsoft attempted multiple measures to restore services, including rolling back updates, restricting traffic to affected servers and shifting traffic to alternative routes.
However, the company noted that some servers became unavailable again after traffic was redirected to them following the deployment of fixes.
The company also cautioned that users might experience a gradual recovery as services returned and their applications reconnected.
"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," Microsoft said in a statement.
The outage highlighted the widespread dependence of businesses and organisations on Microsoft's cloud-based services for communication, collaboration and daily operations.
