Microsoft 365 global outage: The past proved to be extremely troublesome for corporate offices, professionals and ordinary users around the world, when the major cloud services of the leading tech company Microsoft suddenly came to a standstill. Due to this major technical outage in Microsoft 365, millions of users could not access their Outlook inboxes and faced huge delays in sending and receiving emails. Not only this, many important features of Microsoft Teams and the company's AI assistant Copilot also stopped working. More than 1,38,000 cases of Outlook-related issues alone were reported on Outdetector, a website that tracks outages.
The crisis lasted for more than 5 hours, government work also stopped in Australia. Microsoft 365 global outage
The mailbox issues began at 9:47 pm IST on Thursday and turned into a major global outage by 11:56 pm. By 11:30 pm, the number of complaints on Downdetector had reached a peak of 1,38,058. For many users, this crisis lasted for more than five hours. Initially the company felt that this problem was limited only to America and Latin American countries, but later admitted that it had affected users all over the world.
The impact of this technical glitch was not limited to just private companies. In Australia, the government agency 'Service NSW', which handles the important tasks of citizens and businesses, had to appeal to the general public not to come to their offices for the time being, because many important transactions were stuck due to the server being down.
Why did the problem occur and why is it taking so much time to recover??
Microsoft 365 is actually a bundle of Office services like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. This time the main outage occurred in 'Exchange Online', which is the main cloud service for storing, sending emails and managing calendars. Since Exchange Online was sitting on the backend, the inbox was not loading even after the Outlook app was opened. Similarly, normal chat and online calls were running on Teams, but due to dependence on the calendar, the features to schedule new meetings completely failed.
Giving an update on the social media platform 'X', Microsoft said that to protect the delayed emails, the company has increased the email timeout to 48 hours. Some server capacity was restored in India by 9:30 am (IST) on Friday, but services were not completely normal. According to the company, some of the restarted servers crashed again as the load of users increased. Currently, the team of engineers is testing the patch on a small group of machines and rolling back recent changes to network settings.
Denial of cyber attackChatGPT and Claude were also affected
Microsoft has completely rejected the possibility of any cyber attack behind this major outage. A company spokesperson told The Guardian that there was no evidence of a cyber attack behind the outage, but that it was caused by a sudden increase in load on the software that creates the secure connection and changes in network settings.
Popular AI tools were also hit by this outage. OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude's Microsoft 365 connectors failed, causing AI commands related to users' Office data, email and calendars to not work. Microsoft's Copilot itself was unable to read office files and emails during this period.