WASHINGTON: Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and other company apps remained disrupted for thousands of users for more than five hours on Thursday, with the outage also affecting connectors used by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI services.
As of 6 pm ET, Microsoft said it was still working to restore affected servers and had observed limited recovery as users gradually reconnected. Reports of Outlook problems peaked at 138,058 at around 1 pm ET and had fallen to about 34,490 by the evening, according to Downdetector.
The company had earlier said that a number of servers had unexpectedly become unavailable due to elevated demand, rather than an increase in traffic.
“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson said.
