Microsoft outages continue as tech giant works to restore services

Microsoft users across the world continued to experience disruption on Friday as the tech giant worked to resolve outages impacting some of its most popular services.

Monitoring website Downdetector first showed a spike in users reporting problems with Microsoft Teams in Europe at about 6.15pm on Thursday.

Issues were still being reported on Friday morning.

“We appreciate your organisation’s patience and understanding while we work with urgency to resolve this incident,” the company said.

Affected products included instant messaging service Teams, AI service Copilot, Outlook emails and some aspects of Microsoft Cloud services, among others.

In an update on Friday, the tech giant said that although it had managed to get servers operating multiple times overnight, those servers had crashed.

Microsoft said it had tried several solutions to mitigate the problems, including isolating parts of its infrastructure and shifting traffic to alternate routes.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected,” the company said.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also reported issues.

“We’re investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors where new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected,” OpenAI said in a statement on its website.

“We’ll share an update when we know more.”

The tech firm provided regular updates on official Microsoft 365 accounts.

It had earlier directed people to a page on its website for updates, but users complained the page did not load. – PA