Microsoft Corp. struggled to restore access to some of its workplace software hours after an outage began, saying users may still fail to connect to products like email and chat services.
The disruption took down Outlook, Teams and the Copilot artificial intelligence service for most of the US workday on Thursday for some users. Microsoft’s products are among the most widely used software among business, government and educational institutions.
Citing the outage, Workhorse Group Inc., a truck and bus manufacturer, said it would postpone its earnings release, originally scheduled for Thursday, until Monday. School districts, universities and hospitals were among those warning that communications might be limited.
Downdetector tracked a peak of about 200,000 reports of user issues across Microsoft services shortly after 1pm New York time (2am in Malaysia), though the number of new reports has since declined for products including Outlook and Copilot. That didn’t mean service was restored.
In a series of updates to its status page, the company detailed frustrated efforts to fix its malfunctioning systems and route user traffic away from affected servers. After initially struggling to identify the issue and test potential remedies, the company said in an update shortly after 6pm New York time (7am in Malaysia) that it has observed "limited recovery in some regions.”
"We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief,” the company said in an earlier update, at 5:11pm (6:11am in Malaysia) "Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.”
In a separate post on X earlier Thursday, Microsoft said users "in any region” could be affected.
"We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
Over the course of the day, the company added to its tally of the number of products users might fail to access. Services for technologists, including cybersecurity software, file sharing services and administrator tools, were also disrupted.
The company sells those products, along with workplace staples like Word and Excel, in a bundle under the M365 brand.
Microsoft shares were mostly unchanged. – Bloomberg
