A major outage disrupted access to Microsoft 365 services on Thursday, leaving users around the world unable to log in to key platforms, including Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, and the Microsoft 365 admin center for several hours.
The problem was traced to an issue in Microsoft’s Azure Front Door (AFD) content delivery network — a critical system that manages and routes internet traffic for Microsoft’s global cloud services. The outage, which began around 7:40 AM UTC, caused slow connections, timeouts, and sign-in errors for users across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
What happened?
According to Microsoft, the disruption stemmed from a loss of capacity within AFD, which in turn affected Microsoft Entra ID, the company’s sign-in system. As a result, users couldn’t sign in to cloud services or access management portals.
“We’ve restored approximately 98% of the AFD service. We’re actively monitoring telemetry to confirm full recovery. In parallel, we’re initiating failover for the Microsoft 365 Portal service to accelerate the restoration process,” Microsoft said in a service alert.
“Some users may also experience intermitted issues accessing some Microsoft 365 services. Users may also be unable to access their cloud PCs via the Windows app web client.”
By Thursday afternoon, Microsoft’s engineers had recovered 96% of impacted resources, and by 12:07 PM EDT, the company confirmed that all affected services had been completely restored.
“We identified that the Azure front Door (AFD) service had a significant loss of capacity within the Europe and Africa regions, which resulted in impact to some of the Microsoft 365 services,” the company wrote in a final update on the Microsoft 365 admin center.
“The failover of the Microsoft 365 portal service is complete, and we’ve validated that the service has fully recovered. Some of the affected users have also confirmed resolution.”
Although Microsoft hasn’t shared how many users were affected, the outage prevented administrators from accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center or resolving user issues. The company listed the problem as an “ongoing incident” on its Service Health Dashboard — a label usually reserved for major, high-impact disruptions.
Thursday’s event follows a series of recent reliability setbacks for Microsoft 365 this year. Just a day before the latest incident, users worldwide also faced disruptions to Teams, Exchange Online, and other services for several hours. In July, a similar issue prevented business and enterprise administrators from accessing the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Microsoft says it’s now investigating what triggered the breakdown and is reviewing recent system changes to prevent similar incidents in the future. Despite the disruption, the company says its cloud infrastructure remains stable and that most services are operating normally again.
