Microsoft 365 services restored in Japan and China after major regional outage; here's what disrupted services

Microsoft 365 services in Japan and China have been fully restored after thousands of users experienced widespread access and sign-in failures early Thursday. The regional outage affected essential tools including Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot, disrupting business operations and remote work across both markets. Sharing a post on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter), the official page of Microsoft 365 Status said “After an extended period of monitoring, we confirmed that our mitigating actions resolved impact for users. For more information, please see MO1198797 in the admin center”.

What caused Microsoft 365 services outage in Japan and China

According to updates posted in Microsoft’s admin center, the issue stemmed from a routing fault inside the company’s service infrastructure responsible for handling traffic in Japan. The outage led to intermittent login failures, slow loading times and degraded app performance for several hours. Microsoft engineers deployed mitigation steps throughout the morning, rebalancing traffic across backup systems to stabilize services.

Microsoft 365 services outage in Japan and China: Details of the disruption

The outage began around 12:00 am UTC (5:30 amIST), according to Microsoft’s status page. Users across Japan and China reported being unable to sign in to Microsoft 365 apps, with some experiencing repeated timeouts when accessing cloud-based files or using Copilot features. Microsoft confirmed that the disruption was limited to the Asia-Pacific region and said there was no indication of a cyberattack. Early assessments pointed to a routing misconfiguration that isolated parts of otherwise healthy infrastructure.


Throughout the morning, Microsoft shared successive updates as mitigation progressed. At around 12:10 PM JST, engineers reported that traffic had been rebalanced across redundant systems and that services were returning to normal.


In its latest post on X via Microsoft 365 Status, the company said: “After an extended period of monitoring, we confirmed that our mitigating actions resolved impact for users. For more information, please see MO1198797 in the admin center.”


Outage impact and recovery


No data loss or security issues were reported. However, the downtime affected organizations dependent on Microsoft’s cloud tools for daily operations. Copilot-powered workflows, email access, file sync and internal communication channels experienced the most disruption.