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…
