Outages of Microsoft 365 services continued to drag on into the evening on Thursday, even as the company posted on its cloud status page that it had returned a “portion” of its servers to stable status.
Microsoft posted to the page that, “Our investigation has found that a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests.” As of shortly before 9:00 p.m. ET, the status page continued to list pretty much every Microsoft 365 service that interacts with Exchange Online and email services as potentially impacted, with customers advised that a long list of features may still be out.
Those outages included everything from Outlook mailbox access and messaging app Teams (temporarily kneecapping some employers, especially remote ones) to access to AI assistants, Defender XDR, InTune, and SharePoint. The New York Times noted that even the Microsoft Store was out throughout the day. Wired noted that there haven’t been any allegations of a cyberattack and compared the incident to the 2024 CrowdStrike fiasco that accompanied an Azure outage, though the incident certainly hasn’t been as flashy as CrowdStrike’s, which lit up monitors (and even billboards) around the nation with blue screens of death.
In an update after 7:00 p.m. ET, Microsoft acknowledged that some servers were not coming back online correctly.
“The servers we returned to service can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic; we’re analyzing diagnostic data to determine what’s triggering the behavior,” it posted to X. “In parallel, we’re temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in some locations.”
Microsoft later posted around 9:00 p.m. ET that it was seeing “positive results” in restarting its infrastructure and recovering availability, though only “in an isolated manner.” As of about 30 minutes later, the company posted that it was adding capacity “where possible.”
Downdetector, a site that monitors web service accessibility, listed that it had received over 32,200 reports of users experiencing issues connecting to Outlook at around 8:38 p.m. ET, and the number was trending slowly downward to around 25,000 an hour later—a major decrease from its peak at around 1:28 p.m. ET, when it recorded over 129,500 users with issues. The baseline rate in the hours preceding the issues was in the single to low double digits. However, comparatively few people may have been checking their inboxes after learning about the outage or leaving their shifts, so the main takeaway is that serious problems are ongoing.
Microsoft didn’t immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment, but it issued boilerplate statements to various other outlets throughout the day.
“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a spokesperson told Wired. “We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.”
