Washington [US], November 13 (ANI): A Microsoft services outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications for more than five hours on Thursday, affecting thousands of users and also causing problems with connectors used by artificial intelligence services from OpenAI and Anthropic, Reuters reported.

Microsoft was still working to restore affected servers as of 6 pm Eastern Time, with the company reporting limited recovery as users gradually reconnected to its services.

According to Downdetector, reports of problems with Outlook peaked at 1,38,058 around 1 pm ET before declining to approximately 34,490 by Thursday evening. Reports of Microsoft 365 issues had fallen to nearly 13,000 by 5:47 pm ET, while 763 users reported trouble accessing Teams.

Microsoft said the disruption was linked to several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable under elevated load, rather than an increase in traffic.

'We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,' the report said, citing a Microsoft spokesperson.

The company said restored servers had remained stable and that it was shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible while working to bring the remaining affected servers back online.

'As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,' Microsoft said in a statement.

The outage also affected business services that rely on Microsoft's systems. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors, warning that new connections could be broken and tools might not work as expected.

Anthropic also identified an issue with an upstream provider that was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

The disruption had a direct impact on at least one company's business schedule. Electric truck maker Workhorse Group rescheduled the announcement of its third-quarter results, originally expected on November 12, to November 16, citing business disruptions caused by the global Microsoft outage, Reuters reported.

The incident follows another disruption involving Microsoft's Azure cloud platform last month, which affected the company's productivity software and a range of industries worldwide. (ANI)