Microsoft issues outage update as Teams, Outlook, Copilot still down

Detailed summary

The tech giant has said it is 'aggressively pursuing' a fix for the problem, but staff are struggling to get on top of the outage as industries from health services and hospitals, to AI providers, to cybersecurity firms are all being affected

Microsoft has said its outage still cannot be fixed and the exact cause remains unclear in a new statement.

The tech giant issued a key update on the cause of a major outage affecting users worldwide, impacting Teams, Outlook and Copilot.

In the latest statement just after 4am UK time, Microsoft said: "As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we're reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing.

"This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability."

The tech giant has been suffering the major outage for several hours now, saying that it is "aggressively pursuing" methods to fix the problem. The outage is affecting several Microsoft Suite platforms, including Outlook emails, messaging platform Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot.

Industries from health services and hospitals, to AI providers, to cybersecurity firms are being affected.

A later update said the problem was caused by a "large number" of servers being made "unexpectedly unavailable". Microsoft then said it was able to get a "subset" of servers back online and was working to apply those changes more broadly.

The tech titan has explained: "While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them.

"We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service.

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