Thousands of Microsoft customers were left facing interruptions on Thursday after a technical failure affected several of the company's major digital platforms, disrupting access to email, virtual meetings and artificial intelligence services across different parts of the world.
The outage affected popular products such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Copilot, with users reporting difficulties connecting to the services as the technology giant worked to contain the problem.
Microsoft acknowledged the disruptions, saying it had identified connectivity challenges within part of its infrastructure and was taking steps to restore normal operations.
The company initially traced the problem to an area of its infrastructure experiencing unusually high demand, warning that the resulting connection errors could affect customers in any region.
However, further investigations established that the pressure on the system was not caused by a sudden increase in user activity but by several servers unexpectedly going offline.
"We determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure," Microsoft said in a statement.
The failure left the remaining servers handling additional pressure, contributing to difficulties experienced by customers attempting to access the company's services.
Although initial reports emerged from the United States, complaints were also recorded in the United Kingdom and other regions, indicating that the disruption was not limited to a single market.
Data from outage monitoring platform Downdetector showed a sharp increase in reports from British users at approximately 18:30 GMT on Thursday.
In the United States, the number of complaints involving Microsoft Outlook was even higher, with the monitoring platform registering more than 131,000 reports by 18:15 GMT.
The figures highlighted the scale of the disruption, particularly for users who depend on Microsoft's platforms for workplace communication, email services and other digital operations.
In an update released at 19:50 GMT, Microsoft said it was carrying out tests on a configuration change intended to address the underlying technical problem.
The company explained that the affected configuration was causing servers to fail automated health checks, resulting in their systems being marked as unavailable.
"We're testing a configuration" to fix the problem, Microsoft said in its update.
The technology firm also confirmed that all servers affected by the incident had been restarted as part of its recovery efforts.
The restart was among the measures being taken to address the infrastructure problems and improve access to the affected services.
Microsoft, however, did not provide further details on when all users would regain uninterrupted access to its platforms.