Microsoft acknowledges global Outlook and Microsoft 365 outage

Microsoft confirmed that a technical issue was causing a broad service degradation across its Microsoft 365 suite, including Outlook email, Teams, Copilot and related services. The company’s status page noted that users could be unable to connect to Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods and that networking logs were being collected to investigate the errors.

The firm said it had begun redistributing connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure to balance the load and was re-isolating a portion of its infrastructure while restarting certain components. As of early afternoon, monitoring site Downdetector reported that some services were beginning to recover, though many users continued to experience problems for several hours.

Government agencies and businesses were also affected. The State of Michigan’s department of technology, management and budget posted that a widescale outage across North America was delaying email responses. Microsoft later stated it was still pursuing all available pathways to restore service, acknowledging that the elevated load was due to several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable.