Microsoft blames server outages for widespread Microsoft 365 disruptions

Berk Kutay Gökmen

Microsoft said Thursday that unexpectedly unavailable servers, rather than increased user traffic, were behind widespread connectivity problems affecting its Microsoft 365 services across multiple regions.

In its latest update on US social media platform X, Microsoft 365 Status said the outages had placed additional strain on the remaining infrastructure.

“We determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable,” the company said, adding that it was working to safely bring the affected servers back online.

The disruption affected access to Exchange Online mailboxes and potentially other Microsoft 365 services, with users reporting connectivity problems through various access methods.

Microsoft said it had paused all deployments, redirected traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarted impacted servers as part of its recovery…