Microsoft investigated a broad Microsoft 365 outage on Thursday that kept users from connecting to email and other services. According to its admin center advisory (MO1550821), the incident began at 1:26 PM ET and affected Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR. The problem was first reported in the Americas, and the company later confirmed that users in any region could be affected.
According to Microsoft, the load was not driven by more traffic but by a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, straining the rest. The company paused all deployments, redistributed traffic and restarted servers. In a later update it said a process that establishes secure connections was being overwhelmed, and began rolling back a network configuration change that coincided with the start of the disruption.
Earlier that day a separate Teams incident hit users in the Americas from 9:45 to 10:53 AM ET. Microsoft did not say whether the two incidents are related. According to SecurityWeek, the company has reported no evidence of malicious activity.
In its latest published update, around 9 PM ET, Microsoft said restarting the servers was showing improvement, but it had not yet confirmed full recovery or published a root cause.
