Microsoft says attempts to fix global outage not going ‘as expected’

SINGAPORE, Nov 13 – Microsoft says it is racing to resolve a global disruption affecting its apps and services.

In its latest update on X, the company said its team was “seeing positive results” in efforts to restart affected systems and was actively monitoring their performance.

Microsoft had earlier warned that some services could become unresponsive again as traffic increases, adding that it was investigating the cause of the problem.

Services including Teams, Outlook and its artificial intelligence software Copilot have been affected by connectivity problems.

Messaging and online meetings remained largely functional, Microsoft said, adding that it was working urgently to resolve the disruption.

Microsoft executive Charles Lamanna ruled out a cybersecurity incident, saying the global outage was not caused by malicious activity or hacking.

“We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue,” Lamanna said in a post on X.

Microsoft has attributed the disruption to “elevated load” on its infrastructure across multiple regions.

This means its servers – powerful computers that process requests for services such as workplace tools and applications – are handling more work than they can typically manage.

However, the company said the problem was not driven by an increase in traffic but by several servers becoming “unexpectedly unavailable”, placing additional strain on the remaining infrastructure.

A key component of the affected servers was “becoming overwhelmed”, contributing to the disruption, Microsoft later added.