A major outage at Microsoft, which started on Thursday afternoon, persisted for over nine hours, impacting numerous applications and services from the tech leader, including email, Teams, and Copilot.
Earlier that day, Microsoft announced that it was gradually working to restore some of its affected servers to full functionality. However, later updates indicated that these efforts were not yielding the desired results.
“We’ve been monitoring the status of the changes implemented to enhance serviceability and have confirmed that the adjustments are not functioning as anticipated,” the company stated on its website.
“We are exploring alternative workstreams that can be utilized to boost capacity amid ongoing traffic management challenges.”
Following the outage tracker Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported issues with accessing Outlook just after 1 p.m. ET. While new reports declined after this peak, many users indicated they were unable to send or receive emails or faced difficulties loading their inboxes.
A significant number of users also experienced problems with Microsoft’s Teams messaging platform, as well as its AI assistant Copilot and the broader Microsoft 365 offerings.
Microsoft’s Visitor Centre in Redmond, WA. The company indicated that ‘elevated load’ was likely responsible for the connectivity issues reported by users. (Lindsey Wasson/The Associated Press)
Impact on Canadians
The outage affected thousands of Canadians.
According to Downdetector, there were over 20,000 reports of issues with Microsoft services in Canada.
Some federal departments noted challenges accessing emails and meetings, although it remains unclear if any public services have been impacted.
A healthcare network that oversees several hospitals in Toronto issued a code grey, signaling an infrastructure failure.
Unity Health Toronto reported that its teams were facing difficulties with email communications, but assured that patient and resident care was not compromised by the outage.
Via Rail communicated through social media that, due to the outage, some customers might not receive email updates regarding their trips and advised them to check its tracker or register for SMS alerts.
‘Experiencing elevated load’
Microsoft initially stated that a segment of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load,” which it believed was “likely contributing to the connectivity failures.” The company discovered that several servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” due to an issue that caused them to fail during automated monitoring.
Earlier in the day, Microsoft claimed to have “successfully restored” issues related to Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users still reported connectivity problems.