Thought Leadership
A major Microsoft 365 outage has left numerous users unable to send or receive emails through Outlook since Thursday evening. Microsoft blames server failures in North and South America and is testing a fix. The issues remained unresolved on Friday morning.
A widespread outage is disrupting several Microsoft services. Outlook is the hardest hit, but Teams, the Copilot AI assistant, and other parts of Microsoft 365 are also experiencing reliability issues. Around 130,000 Outlook users had reported problems to outage-tracking website Downdetector by approximately 1 p.m. ET (7 p.m. CET) on Thursday.
Most affected users report being unable to send or receive emails. For some, their inboxes will not load at all. Downdetector also received several thousand reports of issues affecting Teams, Copilot, and Microsoft 365.
Servers Fail Automated Checks
Microsoft confirmed the outage through its Microsoft 365 Status account on X. According to the company, users in North and South America are experiencing problems accessing their Exchange Online mailboxes through various connection methods.
Microsoft later provided an initial explanation for the disruption. Parts of its infrastructure are experiencing increased load, which is likely contributing to the connection failures. Several servers unexpectedly became unavailable after failing automated checks. Microsoft has not yet explained why the servers failed. The company is currently testing a fix and says it is “aggressively pursuing all avenues to mitigate the impact.”
At 1 a.m. ET (7 a.m. CET) on Friday, Microsoft posted an update on X confirming that work to resolve the outage was still ongoing:
“We’re continuing to work on recovering our frontend servers while implementing further traffic optimization actions to improve service stability and increase capacity.”
Microsoft
Teams Issues Reported Earlier on Thursday
Microsoft had already reported Teams problems in North America earlier on Thursday afternoon, but subsequently declared the issue resolved. However, some users continued to report connection problems afterward.
(Editorial Team)
