Significant disruptions hit several of Microsoft’s core cloud services on Thursday. Aggregated reports on Downdetector showed a large spike in user complaints for Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams; the peak reporting time was 14:07 Eastern Time.
- Downdetector recorded more than 97,000 reports that Outlook was not working.
- There were over 38,000 reports related to Microsoft 365 issues.
- Approximately 4,500 users reported Teams outages.
Downdetector’s totals indicate widespread problems, but the number of reports does not necessarily equal the exact number of affected users.
Microsoft’s mitigation measures
Microsoft said it was taking all available steps to mitigate the outage. As part of troubleshooting, the company halted the rollout of new deployments, began rerouting network traffic away from affected infrastructure, and restarted faulty servers.
Microsoft also noted that it had previously addressed a Teams outage in North America, which it said was fully remediated; later updates indicated the current incident could affect connections to Microsoft 365 services in additional regions.
Impact on external AI integrations
The outage reached third-party partners as well. OpenAI said it was investigating faults in Microsoft integrations that could cause new connections to drop and lead to unexpected device behavior. Anthropic confirmed that an issue at one of its backend providers was causing disruptions in its Microsoft 365 connector.
Why this matters
Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams form the communication backbone for many organizations; prolonged or recurring outages can lead to operational disruption, productivity losses and business impacts. The incident also affected AI service integrations, underlining how outages at major cloud providers can trigger cascading problems across dependent services and partners.
Status and further information
Microsoft is continuing prioritized remediation steps, but did not provide a specific time for full restoration in its statement. Downdetector and Microsoft’s official service status pages may offer further updates as the situation evolves.
(This article was prepared with assistance from an AI tool; a journalist performed the final editing and verification.)
