Global Microsoft 365 outage disrupts Teams and Exchange services

Microsoft experienced a significant service disruption across its Microsoft 365 services on Monday, affecting core applications including Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online. The outage left users globally unable to access collaboration and communication tools critical to consumers as well as enterprise workflows.

In a series of updates posted on X through the official account of Microsoft 365 Status, Microsoft acknowledged the incident and confirmed that it was actively investigating user reports of service impact. The incident was tracked under the identifier MO1096211 in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.

Minutes after initial acknowledgement, Microsoft initiated mitigation steps and reported that all services were in the process of recovering. “We’ve confirmed that all services are recovering following our mitigation actions. We’re continuing to monitor recovery,” the company said in an update.

Roughly an hour later, Microsoft posted another update, saying, “Our telemetry indicates that all of our services have recovered and that the impact is resolved.”

“The Microsoft outage that disrupted Teams, Exchange Online, and related services was ultimately caused by an overly aggressive traffic management update that unintentionally rerouted and choked legitimate service traffic. According to Microsoft’s official post-incident report, the faulty code was rolled back swiftly, but not before triggering global access failures, authentication timeouts, and mass user logouts,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Not an isolated incident

This incident adds to a growing number of high-profile cloud service disruptions across the industry, raising questions about the resilience of hyperscale infrastructure and the impact on cloud-dependent enterprises. In the last 30 days, IBM Cloud services were disrupted thrice, and a Google Cloud outage just last week impacted over 50 services globally for over seven hours.

Microsoft, in particular, has experienced a steady stream of service disruptions in recent months, exposing persistent fault lines in its cloud infrastructure.

In March this year, the outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, Excel, and more, impacting over 37,000 users. In May, Outlook suffered another outage, which was attributed to a change that caused the problem.

According to Gogia, this sustained pattern reveals architectural brittleness in Microsoft’s control-plane infrastructure — especially in identity, traffic orchestration, and rollback governance — and reinforces the urgent need for structural mitigation.

Costly outages call for contingency planning

Given the complexity and global scale of hyperscale cloud infrastructures, outages remain an ongoing risk for leading SaaS platforms, including Microsoft 365. More so for enterprises that operate in hybrid and remote work environments, threatening business continuity.

Such outages can lead to loss of productivity and disrupted communications, depending on the applications they affect as well as the extent of the outage. This could mean a loss of thousands of dollars to potentially millions of dollars for some, explained Neil Shah, vice president of research, Counterpoint.

Manish Rawat, analyst, TechInsights, said industry estimates suggest that IT downtime can cost mid- to large-sized enterprises between $100,000 and $500,000 per hour, depending on their sector and the criticality of operations. “For large organizations, even a brief 2–3 hour outage could result in millions in lost productivity, reputational harm, and serious operational setbacks, especially in high-stakes sectors like finance, healthcare, and manufacturing,” he said.

Given the recent incidents involving Microsoft 365 services alone, experts believe that enterprises must reduce their overdependence on Microsoft 365. “Organizations should adopt robust contingency plans that include alternative communication tools, offline access to critical documents, and a comprehensive incident response framework,” said Prabhu Ram, VP for industry research group at CMR.