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."

On its M365 status page, it indicated that it had 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”.

This now covers a "configuration change" that it hopes will recover services.

"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."

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