Global Microsoft outage disrupts campus communication

Microsoft reported a widespread outage Thursday morning, affecting the Stanford community’s access to tools such as Outlook, Copilot and Microsoft 365. The outage, which began at 9:54 a.m., impacted over 130,000 users worldwide, according to Downdetector, a company that collects user reports on service issues. Microsoft did not identify the cause of the outage in their original statement. At 10:35 a.m. PT, the company announced the issue was the result of a portion of their infrastructure experiencing an elevated load across multiple regions. The University sent a Community Advisory notice at around 12 p.m. informing affiliates about the situation. Stanford uses Microsoft and its email service, Outlook, as its primary provider. As a result, many students, faculty and staff were unable to access or communicate through their email. “It’s just been really inconvenient,” Amber Tran ’29 said.

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