Microsoft Confirms Office.com and Copilot Outage in North America; Later Mitigates It

Microsoft users in North America faced a rough patch this week as many struggled to access Office.com and the popular Copilot assistant. The outage first surfaced through user reports on DownDetector, with widespread complaints about login failures and server errors.

What Microsoft says about the outage

According to Microsoft’s incident notice, spotted by Bleeping Computer, the disruption mostly hit users in the U.S. and Canada. However, the company admitted the full extent was still being assessed. The issue was tracked internally as MO1138499 and flagged as a critical service incident.

The company explained that only “some users attempting to access Office.com and m365.cloud.microsoft” were affected. While engineers worked on diagnostics, Microsoft encouraged customers to use alternate entry points to Copilot, including copilot.microsoft.com, the Microsoft 365 app, and built-in integrations within Teams and Office apps.

Troubleshooting and rollback

In an update late on August 20, Microsoft linked the disruption to a recent configuration change. The change was rolled out at nearly the same time as the first outage reports. Out of caution, Microsoft immediately started reverting the update.

Earlier today, Microsoft confirmed that the issue had been fully resolved after the rollback. Impacted users were advised to restart their browsers to restore full access.

Microsoft noted, “We’ve completed the reversion throughout the affected infrastructure and confirmed that [the] impact is resolved for all users. Users may need to refresh their browsers to experience relief.”

This isn’t the first time Microsoft 365 customers have run into service outages. Earlier this summer, the company rolled out a workaround for Teams connection errors, and just two months ago, authentication problems rattled users across EMEA and APAC.