Microsoft says its efforts to restore Microsoft 365 have not worked so far, leaving Australian users with limited to no access to Outlook, Teams or SharePoint after a batch of Microsoft servers failed and dropped offline. The company now says a core process on the affected servers is being overwhelmed.
Key Takeaways
- More than 120,000 users had reported Outlook problems on Downdetector by 4.30am Friday.
- As of 9am, the company has yet to restore service, conceding its efforts so far “have not provided the anticipated relief” as it isolates part of its infrastructure to test a potential recovery.
- Microsoft first flagged trouble with Exchange Online mailboxes in the US. It later said users in any region could be affected.
- Microsoft initially blamed elevated load across multiple regions. It then ruled out a traffic surge, saying servers had dropped out unexpectedly and left the remaining infrastructure to carry the load.
- The company has paused all deployments, moved traffic off the affected infrastructure and restarted every affected server.
- Microsoft says no recent change lines up with the start of the outage. It suspects the fault is in a component that processes server health.
- It is also investigating a spike in processor usage on the affected servers.
- In its latest update, Microsoft said an alternative health check method had brought a subset of servers back online. It is now rolling that fix out more widely and preparing automated systems to detect and restart unresponsive servers.
Big Number
120,000. That’s how many Outlook outage reports Downdetector had logged worldwide by 4.30am AEDT, before most of the Australian workforce had logged on.
Crucial Quote
“We’re testing a configuration change to address a problem that’s causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable,” Microsoft said on X.
Key Background
The outage follows disruptions to Microsoft 365 in January and August this year.
On January 22, Outlook, Teams and other 365 services were down for hours before Microsoft said the issue was fixed.
In August, a code update rollout disrupted logins and email, and full recovery took a few days. Today’s affected services include Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR.
This is a developing story. More to come.
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