Microsoft has confirmed an outage affecting search functionality in several Microsoft 365 applications, including Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive. The company said the issue is impacting some users who are attempting to search for content through these services. The problem is tracked under incident MO1456424 in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
According to Microsoft’s incident report, the root cause stems from a recent deployment that introduced a resource utilization inefficiency. This inefficiency has led to increased pressure on affected infrastructure, causing search failures for a subset of users. Microsoft has not yet specified which geographic regions are experiencing the disruption, but the company has labeled the event as an incident, which typically indicates a critical service problem with noticeable user impact.
Microsoft said it has already developed a fix for the issue and has deployed it to reduce resource pressure and restore service for all affected users. The company’s messaging suggests the fix is being rolled out to address the underlying inefficiency rather than requiring a broader system change. Users are advised to monitor the Microsoft 365 Admin Center for updates on the incident status.
This is not the first time Microsoft has dealt with search-related failures in its productivity suite. Last year, the company mitigated similar incidents that broke file search for OneDrive, Outlook on the web, and SharePoint Online users. Those prior disruptions were resolved without long-term damage, but they highlighted recurring vulnerabilities in the search infrastructure across Microsoft 365.
The new outage follows a series of recent reliability challenges for Microsoft’s cloud services. In July, the company addressed a massive outage that took down Azure and Microsoft 365 for users in North America, caused by a bug in its automated network maintenance request system that removed IP routes from more devices than intended. On Monday, Microsoft also resolved another incident that brought down GitHub, its website, the API, and many other services for more than eight hours, with users reporting server errors when trying to access GitHub and issues loading commits, repositories, and Pull Request pages.
As of now, Microsoft has not provided a timeline for full recovery from the search outage, but the deployment of the fix indicates the company is actively working to restore normal operations. The incident remains under investigation, and further details on affected regions or the exact scale of the impact have not been released.
