Microsoft outage hits Outlook and Teams globally; services stabilizing after fix

Microsoft experienced a global outage of its Microsoft 365 services starting Thursday evening, affecting Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, and the admin portal. The company reported no evidence of a cyberattack. Microsoft attributed the failure to an unexpected number of servers going offline, which overloaded a security connection process on remaining infrastructure. After deploying a software patch and adding capacity, the company reported improved stability, though some connection issues persisted. This marks the third major outage in 2026, following a January incident that dropped quarterly uptime to 99.526 percent, the lowest since 2013, and an August email disruption. Experts warn of the risks of single-vendor dependency, urging organizations to maintain alternatives and emergency plans.