Microsoft outage nears 12-hour mark, with no clear timeline for full recovery

Microsoft 365 users continued to experience widespread connectivity problems as a major service disruption stretched towards the 12-hour mark, affecting access to Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams and other Microsoft services across multiple regions.

Despite several recovery measures, Microsoft said its efforts to restore normal service were not progressing as expected, with unexpectedly unavailable servers emerging as the main cause of the disruption.

In its latest update on the US social media platform X, Microsoft 365 Status said it had monitored the impact of changes introduced to improve serviceability but confirmed that they were not delivering the expected results.

"We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances," the company said.

Microsoft clarified in an earlier update that the elevated infrastructure load was not the result of unusually high user traffic.

Instead, a number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure.

The disruption has affected access to Exchange Online mailboxes, while users have also reported connectivity issues with Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Teams through various access methods.

The first reports of the outage emerged at 11.17 am ET (1617GMT) on Thursday, with Downdetector recording more than 97,000 reports of Outlook problems, over 38,000 complaints involving Microsoft 365 and approximately 4,500 reports related to Teams in the United States.