A major technical disruption led to prolonged service interruptions across Microsoft’s key cloud platforms on Thursday, crippling access to Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, and Copilot, with Downdetector registering upwards of 200,000 user complaints at its peak.
According to official statements, Microsoft engineers quickly identified that the root of the issue was an abnormally high load on infrastructure. The company later clarified that the load was triggered by several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, which put pressure on the remaining network and caused some to fail health checks.
In response, Microsoft began the rollout of an alternate health check protocol that enabled some servers to recover. The company also activated automated recovery measures to identify and reboot any unresponsive systems, attempting to stabilize the situation.
Amazon Web Services was also briefly mentioned on Downdetector during the outage window, but the company stated that its platforms were operating normally and linked reports to a separate, unrelated incident.
Following these, Microsoft reported incremental progress as certain services were gradually restored, with the company working to expand the fix to additional servers and implement traffic rerouting.
The outage had a tangible impact on various businesses. Workhorse Group, for example, postponed its anticipated quarterly earnings announcement, citing operational interruptions tied to the Microsoft service disruption. OpenAI and Anthropic confirmed ongoing issues caused by the lack of connectivity to Microsoft’s platforms.
Microsoft continues work to bring all affected systems back online, with only limited regional recovery. The company pledged ongoing communication while recovery efforts proceed.
