Microsoft is struggling to fix a widespread outage that has knocked out several platforms, including Outlook, for millions of users worldwide, with the company acknowledging that its efforts to restore services were 'not going as expected.' Users began reporting problems shortly after 1pm Eastern time on Thursday, and more than ten hours later many remained unable to open their inboxes or send emails.

More than 430 million people use Microsoft's suite of subscription apps, though the company has not confirmed how many users are affected. Problems have also been reported with the Teams workplace messaging app, the Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft said infrastructure experiencing an 'elevated load across multiple regions' was likely contributing to the connectivity errors, and that a number of servers had become 'unexpectedly unavailable' after failing automated health checks, though it was not immediately clear why.S1S2

The company said it was testing a fix and rolling out an alternative method to bring the affected servers back online, and was trying to identify 'alternate workstreams' to add capacity. Around noon, Microsoft said mitigative actions had restored service health in North America, but users continued reporting the outage, which fell in the middle of the workday for many.S1

Microsoft executive vice president Charles Lamanna said there was no indication the outage was the result of malicious or cyber activity. Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said Microsoft had told him it did not believe a cyber attack was the cause. OpenAI said the outage had left ChatGPT with degraded performance and was affecting Microsoft connectors used by its tools.S1