Microsoft outage disrupts services as recovery remains incomplete

Microsoft said a global disruption affecting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and some cloud services was still limiting service capacity on Friday, after attempts to fix the problem did not work as expected. The company reported early signs of stabilisation later in the day, but said service health remained variable and capacity had not returned to normal.

The outage began on Thursday and affected users in multiple regions. Microsoft said elevated load across its infrastructure was contributing to connectivity problems. It said the load was not caused by increased traffic, but by servers that had become unexpectedly unavailable, placing strain on the remaining infrastructure. The company has not published a full explanation of what caused the servers to fail.

Microsoft said it had restarted affected servers, paused deployments, shifted traffic away from affected infrastructure and tried other changes. In an update on Friday, it said one change intended to improve service was not working as expected. The company said it was carefully reintroducing traffic and expanding capacity with virtual machines as it continued recovery work.

The disruption affected different features in different...