Microsoft restarts servers after Teams, Outlook and Copilot connectivity outage

Microsoft said it had restarted all affected servers after users worldwide reported outages of Teams, Outlook and its Copilot AI software on Thursday.

The company said part of its infrastructure was carrying "elevated load", which was likely contributing to connectivity errors, and that the problems could affect users "in any region" although the issue was first reported in the United States.

Microsoft said the "elevated load" was not driven by increased traffic but rather by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which strained the remaining infrastructure.

At about 18:15 GMT, monitoring site Downdetector showed more than 131,000 reports of Outlook problems in the US. At around 18:30 GMT it recorded a spike in reports from UK users.

In an update at 19:50 GMT, Microsoft said it was "testing a configuration" to fix the fault, which was "causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable". All affected servers had been restarted, it added.