Microsoft outage hits second day, disrupts OpenAI and Anthropic services

Microsoft's ongoing outage has entered its second day, affecting services like Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, and also impacting AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic. The company has ruled out a cyberattack but says recovery efforts have not yet yielded lasting results. The disruption, which peaked with nearly 130,000 user reports across 74 countries, stems from a configuration issue causing servers to fail during automated checks. Microsoft engineers have tried rolling back updates and limiting traffic, but affected servers become unavailable again as traffic returns. Experts describe the incident as a cascading failure, where overloaded remaining servers crash under redirected user demand. The outage follows a similar Azure cloud disruption last month, highlighting ongoing vulnerabilities in critical digital infrastructure.