Microsoft says attempts to restart affected infrastructure were “not taking as expected” despite initial “positive results”, following a mass global outage affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services across the globe.
In the early hours of Friday morning, Australian time, Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise users plus individuals found themselves locked out of services.
Services including Microsoft Copilot 365, Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Fabric and SharePoint Online were unavailable to business users.
The outage also affected Exchange Online, leaving users unable to access their mailbox.
Those disruptions affected businesses across Australia, limiting access to vital communications tools and information-sharing systems.
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s consumer products also felt the outage pinch, with products ranging from Outlook and OneDrive facing troubles.
As of Friday afternoon, Microsoft says its systems are still affected and are enduring “sustained traffic management imbalances.”
Disruptions first began in the early hours of Friday morning, with the company taking to social media to acknowledge user-reported outages affecting Exchange Online mailboxes across the Americas.
By 5:35 AM AEDT, it “determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors”.
However, by 6:31 AM AEDT, Microsoft found the elevated load wasn’t pushed by heightened traffic, but rather by numerous servers “being unexpectedly unavailable”, straining the remaining infrastructure.
The outage continued into Friday morning with the company providing an update at 9:09 AM AEDT, just in time for the work day to start, stating “our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief”.
It wasn’t until 12:59 PM AEDT that the tech giant said: “We’re seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure and recover server availability in an isolated manner.”
“We’re actively monitoring the performance of these portions of infrastructure to verify stability, which we suspect will support improved availability as these actions are subsequently expanded more broadly,” the post continued.
However, despite initial hope, by 2:13 PM AEDT the Microsoft team reported the attempted fixes were “not taking as expected”.
“We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances,” it said in a social media post.
This article first appeared on SmartCompany. You can red the original here.
