Microsoft reports outage affecting Exchange Online, Teams and other 365 services
Microsoft said an outage on Thursday disrupted access to Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint and other Microsoft 365 services, and is working to restore functionality.
Microsoft confirmed that its 365 business and enterprise services experienced an outage on Thursday, affecting users in North America and the Americas. The company posted on its status page at 10:40 a.m. ET that it was investigating reports of Teams connectivity problems, and by 12:55 p.m. ET it acknowledged issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods.
The firm later attributed the disruption to servers going offline rather than increased traffic, noting that “the network was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.” Microsoft said it began redistributing traffic across its global infrastructure and paused all deployments while restarting affected servers.
Impacted services listed included Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR. A Microsoft spokesperson told WIRED, “We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online. We appreciate our customer's patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.”
User reports on Downdetector rose around noon, and a later update on X indicated that a problem caused servers to fail automated health checks, prompting reboot attempts. No evidence of a cyberattack has been identified. Similar outages have occurred previously, such as a July 2024 incident involving a corrupted update from Crowdstrike that temporarily affected Azure services.