Microsoft is investigating an ongoing issue preventing users across North America from accessing Office.com and the company’s Copilot AI-powered assistant.
According to user reports on DownDetector, this incident began impacting Microsoft’s services almost two hours ago and is currently triggering server connection problems and causing issues when trying to log into accounts.
“Impact is specific to some users attempting to access Office.com and m365.cloud.microsoft. The majority of reports are from users located in the North America region, but the full scope of impact is still under investigation,” Microsoft said in a new service alert published on the Microsoft 365 admin center.
The company is currently collecting telemetry data to identify the root cause of the outage and attempting to reproduce the issue to find a solution.
“We’re continuing to review service telemetry from components that facilitate Office.com functionality. In parallel, we’re attempting to reproduce the issue internally to gather additional network diagnostics,” it added.
Until this ongoing outage is mitigated, customers can still access Copilot using alternate methods, such as:
- copilot.microsoft.com,
- Microsoft Copilot for the Microsoft 365 app,
- Microsoft 365 applications (including Microsoft Teams and Office Apps).
While the company is still investigating which regions are impacted, this incident has been classified as a critical service issue (tracked under MO1138499 in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center), which typically involves noticeable user impact.
This week, Microsoft has also shared a workaround for a known issue triggering “couldn’t connect” errors when launching the Microsoft Teams desktop and web apps.
Two months earlier, the company mitigated another incident that caused issues with certain Microsoft 365 authentication features for customers in the Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA), and Asia Pacific (APAC) regions.
Update August 20, 11:56 EDT: Microsoft is reverting a recent configuration change to mitigate the impact.
“We’ve identified a specific configuration change that started deployment at approximately the same time we received the initial reports of impact. Out of an abundance of caution, we’re reverting the update as a potential mitigation strategy,” the company said.
“Additionally, we’re continuing to analyze network traces, authentication flows and Content Delivery Network (CDN) interactions to determine the root cause.”
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