Microsoft outage continues into second day, company cites elevated load
Microsoft confirmed that a global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and other 365 services persisted into a second day, attributing the disruption to elevated load and stating no malicious activity was detected.
Microsoft said its workplace services, including Outlook and Teams, remained disrupted for users in India and other regions on Friday, a day after a worldwide outage began. The company’s service health page listed "service degradation" for Microsoft 365 business, enterprise and consumer products as of 11:16 a.m. India time.
Microsoft is pursuing multiple workstreams to identify the cause of a traffic influx and to restore its backend servers. The firm added that it is not aware of any malicious activity behind the incident and will publish a post-incident report once the issue is resolved.
"As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution," Microsoft said.
The outage has impacted operations at several organisations, including a major professional services firm that relies heavily on Microsoft 365. Internal IT teams are working to restore services, with priority given to the Asia-Pacific region.
In Bengaluru, Sambratha Shetty, chief operating officer of the Synergia Foundation, warned that the disruption poses significant challenges for the city’s IT firms and outsourcing contracts that depend on continuous cloud services.
"Bengaluru’s tech leaders should treat cloud failure as certain, not hypothetical. That means backup communication channels, multi-vendor setups and regularly tested continuity plans," Shetty said.
The outage affected a range of Microsoft 365 components, including the Admin Center, education tools, and Copilot AI features. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 also experienced issues, potentially limiting URL verification.
Teams users reported mixed experiences: some could not make or receive calls, while others were able to join scheduled meetings. Microsoft clarified that core Teams functionality remained intact, but features reliant on Exchange Online faced failures.
Microsoft posted on X that efforts to repair the Outlook outage were not progressing as expected and that the firm was exploring alternative solutions for affected users worldwide.