The key facts

  • Microsoft reported an outage in Exchange Online and other Microsoft 365 products
  • The main problems with email access are among users in North and South America
  • The company said automated recovery systems have taken measures and telemetry shows the scale of the outage is decreasing

Global outage in Microsoft cloud services

Microsoft announced on the social network X that a technical failure was causing disruptions in its cloud email service Exchange Online and other Microsoft 365 products. Gazeta.Ru reported this, citing the company's statement.

Scale of the problem and measures being taken

According to the company, the main problems with email access were reported by users in North and South America. At the same time, Microsoft 365 disruptions may affect customers worldwide — meaning the outage is formally global in nature, even if it is most noticeable in the Americas region.

Service recovery

Microsoft said that automated recovery systems have already taken measures to restore the services. According to the company's telemetry, the actions taken are reducing the scale of the outage. The company's statements did not say the problems had been fully resolved, so the final restoration of the services remains an open question.

Context: outages in the Runet

The Gazeta.Ru article comes against the backdrop of recent large-scale disruptions in other regions as well: on October 8, Russians complained about a major outage of the Runet, when dozens of services stopped working at once. The monitoring system recorded hundreds of reports concerning the websites of Yandex, Russian Railways, VKontakte, CIAN, Avito, Google, banks, and telecom operators; most complaints came from Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as from Krasnodar Krai, the Novosibirsk, Sverdlovsk, Omsk, and Rostov regions, Bashkortostan, and Tatarstan. This is a separate incident, not directly related to the Microsoft outage, but it shows how noticeable such disruptions become for users.