Microsoft restores services after five-hour outage hits Outlook, Teams, and AI tools
Microsoft has begun restoring services after a major outage disrupted Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, and other apps for thousands of users for over five hours on Thursday. The company confirmed some affected servers are back online and stable. The outage, which peaked with 138,058 Outlook complaints around 11:30 PM IST, also impacted AI connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic. Microsoft attributed the issue to unexpected server unavailability due to increased load, not traffic growth, and is rerouting traffic to mitigate disruptions. Microsoft warned that restored servers could fail again under renewed traffic, but recovery is progressing as users gradually reconnect. The company is accelerating the process of bringing remaining affected servers online, with capacity restoration expected to yield gradual improvements.