The global outage we have already told you about, which affected Microsoft Teams, Outlook and a number of Microsoft 365 services, has now been ongoing for more than 12 hours. Disruptions have been reported in more than 74 countries and territories, with companies, city administrations and public service providers among those affected.
The outage affects Outlook, Microsoft 365 for business and enterprise, Azure, OneNote, OneDrive and Microsoft To Do. For some users, Teams continues to work partially, but access to calendars, linked files and other features is difficult. Users report being unable to open their mailboxes, send messages or use connected applications.
Microsoft says there are no indications that the outage was caused by malicious or cyber activity. „There are no indications that this is the result of malicious or cyber activity“, the company said in its incident update.
According to Microsoft's explanation, the problem is related to a large number of servers that failed automated health checks and became unavailable. This shifted the load onto the remaining infrastructure without any overall increase in traffic. The company is simultaneously increasing capacity, restarting the affected machines and testing changes to the network configuration.
In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service warned that the outage could lead to delays in receiving some prescriptions. Email problems are making communication more difficult between medical teams and other units that rely on Microsoft's services.
Microsoft reports improvement in individual regions, but the restored servers need to be monitored because some of them have failed again when the load was returned. The company continues to process the accumulated emails, with an extended 48-hour delivery wait window in place.
The full cause of the outage has still not been announced. Microsoft says that after the services have been stabilised, it will publish a detailed report outlining the root cause and measures to prevent a similar incident.