A widespread outage on Thursday disrupted Outlook and access to Exchange Online mailboxes, with connectivity errors also reported across Microsoft 365 services.
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A widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms on Thursday, including Outlook, as many users reported problems accessing email accounts and encountering other errors across the company’s app suite.
Outage tracking site Downdetector received reports from nearly 130,000 users of trouble accessing Outlook just after 1 p.m. ET, though the volume of reports later declined.
Many users said they could not send and receive emails or had difficulty loading their inboxes.
Thousands of reports also pointed to issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app Teams, as well as its AI assistant Copilot and wider Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft said it was investigating customer reports involving email and Teams, and later stated it was aware of users experiencing “issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.”
In updates posted on social media, Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing elevated load,” which it said was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” and added it would begin redistributing traffic to help balance the load. “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” the Microsoft 365 Status account wrote on X.
Earlier on Thursday, Microsoft said it had “successfully restored” problems related to Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.
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