Microsoft outage drags on for hours, disrupting Outlook, Teams for thousands

Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other apps of the company remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday, with the outage also hitting connectors used by OpenAI's and Anthropic's AI services. As of 6 p.m. ET, Microsoft said it was still working to return affected servers to service, and had observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected. Reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 around 1 p.m. ET and had fallen to around 34,490 by evening, according to Downdetector. The company had earlier in the day pointed to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable for the elevated load and not an increase in traffic. "We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online," a Microsoft spokesperson said. By 5:47 p.m. ET, the number of reports of problems with Microsoft 365 had fallen to nearly 13,000 user, while there were 763 reports of users having trouble accessing Teams, according to Downdetector. The tech giant had then said the restored servers had remained sta