Service degradation on Microsoft 365

415 points437 comments6 hours ago
beowulfey

Copied this from my post in the other thread:

The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.

9:02 PM UTC: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.

Previous status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.

8:52 PM UTC: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.

Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.

7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.

7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.

7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.

6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.

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tatersolid

My last email was received at 5.5 hours ago. Teams chat and meetings are the only thing in Microsoft 365 that seem to be working. All our Azure infrastructure seems fine so this is something 365-specific.

Everyone has occasional outages but this is the worst 365 outage our org has seen since starting with M365 in 2019.

soundworlds

Update from Microsoft: "We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly.

"We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-13/microsoft-outage-affe...

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k_sze

And I can't reach my self-hosted mail server in the Outlook desktop app because of this.

For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account, if I add the account in Outlook.

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emschwartz

I'm amazed to see so many services down and to see that Github and Github actions are still working

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nazgulsenpai

> Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.

DDOS?

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sonicrocketman

Down detector shows like everything is down. AWS, Azure, Office, Gmail. Everything. https://downdetector.com

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game_the0ry

Got notification at work the MS 360 services were offline or degraded and the company was working with MS to fix the problem.

Lamest tech company imo. Why dont you lay off some more staff, Satya, maybe that will fix the problem.

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dkpk

Here's the Reddit post with discussions around this: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1xuje83/microsoft...

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sonicrocketman

Downdetector says LOTS of stuff is down. https://downdetector.com

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jwnin

It's insane that Microsoft continues to have global outages. Tech debt is real, service delivery on a planetary level means change is measured and deliberate, but...it's been years. YEARS.

matt3210

Software / software service quality has been declining for a few years IMO.

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RajT88

ThousandEyes while it was loading seemed to have centralized around it mostly being a Microsoft outage.

https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365

Azure status does not document anything:

https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status

All that said... Stuff on my home PC started getting various DNS issues around the time my email started acting weird. Hard to say how widespread it is. It may be bigger than Microsoft even.

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testplzignore

https://x.com/MSFT365Status/status/2120938282204688468

> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.

infn8loop

I suspect some possible relation to SignDrop or attempts to patch it.

SignDrop is an unpatched Windows zero-day local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit that allows a standard user to gain NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges by abusing the Common Log File System (CLFS) kernel driver (clfs.sys). Security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri (also known as MSNightmare or Nightmare Eclipse) published a detailed technical write-up and functional proof-of-concept (PoC) code on GitHub on November 10, 2026.

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vermontdevil

Looks like a new vector attack for the future.

JPascal_

In my language many would say “descansito” :)

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xtiansimon

WOO-HOO! I'm going home.

andrewinardeer

GitHub the other day went down because of an influx of anonymous users. Microsoft has hinted that surging connections caused the outage. I wonder if these two are linked?

ArcHound

The status page reports that defender, DLP and others are now affected. This could get really ugly really fast.

thraway2079081

Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. Wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.

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burnedbyhell

I'm able to see I have voicemails not able to listen to voicemails in Teams. Same issue?

duxup

Same for me. Status won’t load even.

Personally I kinda enjoy these outages…

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NichoPaolucci

Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?

Status page is down. Much of our org is halted.

Fingers crossed that Azure isn't impacted (seems fine so far)

(https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-...)

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EvanAnderson

https://status.cloud.microsoft/ is very slow to load.

The page is showing a "Service Degredation" for "Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise)"

Updates below in reverse chronological order:

From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:30:36 PM UTC update:

Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.

---

From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:16:03 PM UTC update:

Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.

---

From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 6:59:24 PM UTC update:

Current status: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.

---

From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:32:25 PM UTC update:

Title: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services

User impact: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.

More info: Potentially impacted services include:

- Exchange Online

- Microsoft Teams

- SharePoint Online

- Microsoft Copilot 365

- Microsoft Defender XDR

Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.

Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.

---

From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:10:02 PM UTC update:

Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.

User impact: Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods.

More info: Potentially impacted connection methods may include:

- Outlook on the web

- Messaging API (MAPI)

- Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)

- Representational State Transfer (REST) API

Current status: We’ve identified connectivity errors occurring on a portion of Exchange Online infrastructure which receives and processes users’ access requests. We’ve collected networking logs to review to further investigate the source of these errors and confirm our next steps.

Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access their mailbox in Exchange Online using the affected connection methods.

Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 8:00 PM UTC

---

Aside: What with the nature of the Teams, OneDrive, etc, products being Sharepoint and Exchange in a trenchcoat this is probably creating quite a mess for services besides Exchange Online, too.

Edit: Looks like the status page needs a status page.

Edit: Verified w/ multiple other parties that Teams and OneDrive are having issues, too. Interestingly, Microsoft 365 Family services are working fine. That makes me wonder if that product is running on separate infrastructure (or just hasn't caught fire yet).

Edit: The RSS feed seems to load fairly quickly: https://status.cloud.microsoft/api/feed/mac

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agumonkey

Anybody else was served raw text of source by default ? (gwire is down too)

trentor

I always wonder what would happen if 365 goes down for a week.

neilsimp1

Down for our whole organization as well.

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jenimac926

anyone else just watch the admin portal post an update and then roll it back to the previous update....guess it didn't work. "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service." was the old message from 7:52 UTC now it rolled back to 7:30 UTC update again

SirFatty

Outlook is fine. Exchange is experiencing issues.

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rwmj

Does anyone know if this is affecting DuckDuckGo? DDG is really slow and intermittent at the moment.

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Maximilian_Bet

It is M365 having issues, not Azure cloud services.

CerebralCerb

Not surprising. Azure's data centers are out of capacity. In our region they've announced they won't be able to build out capacity for several years.

lajy
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rainee

Outlook calendar won't load? Is this part of the outage? Unfortunately, I downloaded several updates and rebooted. I'm not sure if this is because of the updates or the Microsoft outage.

jobe777

russian hackers in Kazan hopping thru Sluck Belarus South Africa Brazil hitting MS backdoor w/ zero day Cve-2026-124194 RuskiNet group hit East U in Boydtin Virginia. Pro Iranian.

vdkyes

In cybersecurity we had black october, now we having black November it seems

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z500

Outlook has been down for us for the last 2 hours

sgt

Also noticed the Partner center is down e.g for uploading apps to the Microsoft Store.

ChrisArchitect
syngrog66

I note that Microsoft became heavily off-shored, on-shored and AI-pilled/vibe-coded in recent years. With lots of layoffs of the highest caliber and/or most experienced engineers.

nashashmi

To get AI prompts, i am using Bing. Bing still works!

kittiesunicorns

just got an email from the NYC DOE

"School staff are currently unable to receive or send emails due to a nationwide Microsoft Outlook outage. We hope that the issue will be resolved soon and will send an update when we have more information."

LtdJorge

Our Outlook doesn't work either

bearjaws

Seems like URL scanning is down entirely and some intermittent failures in Sharepoint.

anuptalwalkar

It looks much wider across aws, gcp? Whats going on?

htrp

bgp misconfigured or AI agent issues?

JPascal_

Affected in Mexico also, Azure seems fine still.

bharathreddy497

This should have done long back. Evertime I use excel I just cant control my anger.

rainee

Outlook calendar won't load?

MadrasTh0rn

Can confirm. Down and out

jobe777

RuskiNet Cve-2026-124194 hopped tio East U in Boydton VA zero day backdoor pro iranian

apercu

This just a couple weeks after they rolled out a dark pattern office update for Mac users to try to trick them in to 365 subscriptions.

tony69

Amateur hour at Microsoft. It baffles me how many companies can’t figure out how to make a status page that can handle the high loads it’ll have to sustain when the service they monitor is down. That’s pretty much the only reason to have a status page in the first place.

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Waterluvian

The M365 status page not loading reminds me of one of my favourite Simpsons jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hz2uOSdV24

drillsteps5

Yep my org as well.

It's funny how text-only niche forum that looks like it's running on RPi stuffed in someone's closet is routinely used to discuss active outages in multimillion/billion corps.

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dbvn

> Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.

I think it's safe to say, if the server is unresponsive, the change is not effective.

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xp84

In the words of an ancient ...I think newgrounds(?) video embedded in a SWF, "I can't get to my email" Edit: here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE

Hope this entertains you while we can't get to our emails.

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rconti

It took 30 seconds to open a "local" file in Word, and my Outlook email wasn't updating.

In other words, a day that ends in "y".

My company was recently acquired by a company that uses Office, so I'm using Microsoft products for the first time in 15 years. It's absolutely APPALLING how bad they are. I assumed they got fairly usable in the last 15 years, but it seems they've gone backwards.

For all my gripes about GSuite, ... I don't know how businesses can justify using software this bad.

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corvad

Not sure they got the memo to host the status page in separate infrastructure...

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throwaway_1016

Ironically, this article is down as well.

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at1as

For whatever reason 6.1 Sol is completely lobotomized for me this morning, so it wasn't helping much with the investigation, but it was pretty clear that MSFT was having issues.

I have a teams app with Outlook integration and received a bunch of 502s to smba.trafficmanager.net and a my logs are riddled with "RestError Temporary connection issue when contacting service. Please wait before retrying request"

I will say this, having apps deployed on Slack and Teams, Slack rarely has issues (an exponential backoff is enough to simply never worry about my Slack integration). With Teams I have mysterious failures to debug at least 2x a year - and they're often not very transparent about them (often my first instinct is to search Twitter and find people complaining about the same thing).

tcoff91

When I worked at a company that relied on this, I called it "Microsoft 361" because it went down about 4 days a year

layoric

Also, their status page is a joke.. one entry, no timeline, is there another official one that has more detail?

analog31

On the bright side, so much work got done today.

flkiwi

Strangely, Teams chat is working fine here. Anything in Teams that is tied to other parts of O365, including the calendar, is dead. I'm currently watching a training video on sharepoint.com, so that's fine too, for now.

While I don't expect this to be the case, I'm emotionally prepared for this to be some sort of "dicks out for Harambe"-style action protesting JH's departure from Nvidia, on a larger and more technical scale.

Edit: Typo.

semiquaver

My company is being pressured very aggressively by Microsoft to migrate all our users from us-managed Exchange to Microsoft-managed Exchange Online. Guess which users still have email today and which do not…

loloquwowndueo

Remember, my guys : “Microsoft Works” is an oxymoron.

thraway2079081

Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. I wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.

My employer is very very close to MSFT. Both my employer and MSFT have been aggressively moving jobs to India, and firing people in the US. It's hard not to feel some schadenfreude.

friendlypenguin

No worries, the AI was installing an update...now it's looking for the issue, found Exchange and deleted it...

microsucks

We are in the middle of a SPA and DocuSign AND Hotmail (witnesses) both seem to be down. You cannot make it up.

cozzyd

They can just rebrand as MS364

mattbrewsbytes

Did Anthropic's new release this week include an AI rollout plan (i.e. not approved by humans) to take down Office and Outlook for a lot of enterprises? I half-snarkily ask since we have seen "rogue AI" headlines before.

A fictional story about AI could be that it rolled out its new document, spreadsheet, slides, etc. apps, knows the IPO is coming up and decided to make a lot of opportunities for people to sign up for their new release by DDosing their competitor.

dbvn

who puts their status page on servers the status is supposed to be for?

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bastien-brd

Maybe due to everyone pre-downloading GTA VI today ;-)

zmmmmm

Will be interesting to see if this gets attributed to AI in some way.

whatever1

And magically they will claim 99.999999999999999% availability of services, when on average hyperscalers are down 1 day per year.

None of the admin ran shops are down 1 day per year.

bigwheels

They'll have to rename it Microsoft 364.

OnceMoreUntoThe

Sure, outlook.com is down, which is bad for everyone that chose to host their email there, I guess, but as an interesting side-effect, everyone with an on-premise Exchange server and "new Outlook" clients is affected as well.

Because, well, once upon a time there was Exchange Server and MAPI (the "Messaging API"), and that actually worked pretty well, and pretty much everyone started using it (or one of its EWS/ActiveSync offshoots), but then the Internet happened and ruined everything, but we got MAPI-over-HTTPS eventually, which by that time had grown so many warts that nobody at Microsoft really understood it anymore, so that got deprecated, even though, well, everyone and everything still uses it.

The new hotness was Azure-slash-Office-365, and that's where the "new Outlook" web interface lived and (sort-of) continues to live, and the on-prem customers got stuck with the "Exchange Subscription Edition", which was basically Exchange 2019 plus security hotfixes at extortionate rates, but with none of the new functionality.

And, since MAPI continued to be really, really hard even in the age of Copilot, access from the new hotness to the deprecated on-prem servers was implemented via IMAP (LOL), but force-proxied via the outlook.com cloud/clownshow.

Which is why, right now, many Microsoft customers that thought they were self-hosting their email are entirely down. Lessons might be learned here, but I sort-of doubt it...

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caycep

Outlook is down AND Jensen is out? it's like some cosmic convergence

Caloric3002Swed

Office 365 parts goes down all the time. Usually around 20:00 CEST time, not sure if that is prime change time over in the USA but very handy as it is usually fixed next day.

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butz

Nice to see that intern finally learned not to push to prod on Friday.

robotnikman

No wonder my email is not working.

Foobar8568

But Linkedin is up! Yeah!

Surac

That are not the Druids your searching for...

tiahura

Starting to look like something even Mythos can't troubleshoot.

Lynicis

i was gonna blame my isp but now i can see who bottlenecked my internet

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bix6

Down

[deleted]
utsavo_afk

email still not working, outlook

monkaiju

Micro$lop strikes again

tonymet

- outlook is down

- live.com is down

- onedrive loads the UI, but all of my contents are missing

- MS Edge sync is down (503s )

Yup, major-major outage.

sonicrocketman

Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/303/ (outages as modern compiler)

Kye

It's probably DNS.

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debo_

The GPUs are having a moment of silence for their fallen leader

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cidd

Microsoft: Claude, fix outage and make no mistakes.

[deleted]
utsavo_afk

email doesnt work

xyst

GH and MS have been having a tough past couple weeks. Actions (hosted on shitty azure cloud) have been piss poor lately. I am honestly surprised GH and MSFT have the gall to continue advertising 99.9% uptime [1]

[1] https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla

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beowulfey

The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.

7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.

7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.

7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.

6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.

likelybot

LETS GO HELL YEAH

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hbcondo714

[dead]

jmspamerton

[dead]

cromka

Nice, so at least your messages sent to their SMTP servers will actually bounce instead of being silently dropped /s

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hassnmauller

[flagged]

ericfrederich

Is this related to GTA6 being pushed to consoles a week prior to launch? Would they ever admit it if that were the case?

I want to believe this is the cause. It'd be especially funny because businesses were already anticipating the productivity loss when GTA6 comes out, but now we have actual productivity loss because of this outage (and it's affecting people who were never going to play the game anyway, lol)

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dorongrinstein

[flagged]

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