Microsoft Apologizes for Nationwide Outage; Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams, Sharepoint, Copilot & More Still Down & Not Working for Many

The last few hours have been an absolute mess for Microsoft 365 users worldwide. Outlook, Teams, Exchange Online, and several other Microsoft services have suffered a massive outage. Despite Microsoft’s earlier recovery announcements, many users are still reporting problems accessing essential services.

As we reported in our Outlook outage coverage, Downdetector reports previously surged past 110,000. We also covered the Exchange Online mailbox access failures and Teams issues too.

Now, Microsoft has addressed one major concern surrounding the incident. Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of Copilot, Agents, and Platform, says there is no indication the outage resulted from malicious or cyber activity.

Microsoft says outage wasn’t caused by a cyberattack

In a post on X, Lamanna apologized for the disruption and confirmed that Microsoft is working to address the issue.

“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” he wrote. He added that there was currently no indication of malicious or cyber activity behind the incident. However, Microsoft has yet to establish and publicly confirm the complete root cause.

Speaking of the ongoing issue, Microsoft previously identified elevated infrastructure load across multiple regions. Its investigation found that a core process on affected servers was becoming overwhelmed, causing them to stop responding and reducing available capacity.

The recovery attempts haven’t gone smoothly either. Microsoft managed to bring some servers back online, but several became unresponsive again once traffic returned. The company has since tried traffic restrictions, alternative network routes, server restarts, and rebuilding affected machines using an earlier software configuration.

The impact also extends beyond Outlook and Teams. Microsoft has listed SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Defender, Planner, To Do, Intune, Purview, and other services among the potentially affected products. Some features that depend on Exchange Online are disrupted, while others continue working.

That being said, Microsoft hasn’t provided a confirmed timeline for full restoration. Its engineers are still investigating server availability and testing additional recovery methods.