Microsoft users caught up in global M365 outage

Microsoft is in the midst of a major outage that is “potentially” impacting a number of M365 services, notably Exchange Online access, worldwide.

Australian enterprise users are likely waking to email not loading and an error message that “something went wrong” with a “recommended action” to refresh.

The vendor first acknowledged the issues at 4.54am AEDT. 

The company’s status page, which is slow to load, indicates that Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR may also be impacted.

Microsoft has traced the issue to a “portion of infrastructure … experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” according to a post on X.

Specifically, it said that “a number of servers [are] unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”

It has since attributed the problems to a “specific component” on the servers that processes health checks, which Microsoft is now attempting to bypass with a “configuration change”.

“We’re testing a configuration change to address a problem that’s causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable,” it said.

“In parallel, we’ve initiated a restart of all affected servers and are monitoring health as they return to service.”

On its M365 status page, Microsoft indicated that it had also attempted to move traffic off the impacted servers and redistribute it to healthy infrastructure.

It has so far not indicated in which cloud region the impacted servers are located.

It added on X that it is “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact”, including an internal pause on “all deployments”.

Microsoft said it had not identified any “recent change” to its environment that it would be able to roll back.

This is a developing story. iTnews is adding to it as more information becomes available.

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AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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