Microsoft has been dealing with a widespread service outage and accompanying connection problems since late Monday afternoon. The disruption began around 5 pm German time on Monday. Affected services included Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Defender XDR, Universal Print, and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Reports of disruption surged quickly
The outage also showed up on the German status-tracking portal Allestörungen.de, where reports from users about Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Outlook surged rapidly between 5 and 6 pm, while user complaints piled up on social media around the same time. Microsoft addressed the incident in a post on X around 6 pm, initially referring only to "Exchange Online issues." The company later added that there was a problem with an authentication component that apparently also affected other services. Details were available in Microsoft's admin center and on the company's status portal.
Different services, different impacts
The outage affected services in different ways. OneDrive and SharePoint saw problems with syncing, opening or uploading files, and displaying account or storage information. Exchange Online and Microsoft Teams had connection problems as well as errors using search functions or the calendar. It wasn't immediately clear when the outage would be fully resolved. Microsoft said the measures it had implemented improved things like email delivery, but search functions reportedly remained widely disrupted. The company continued working to restore all affected services. The incident once again shows how a single central component, such as shared authentication, can simultaneously take down multiple seemingly independent cloud services.