Microsoft investigates widespread outage affecting Outlook, Teams and other services
An outage disrupted Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services on Thursday, prompting the company to investigate and redistribute traffic to alleviate elevated load.
A broad service disruption hit Microsoft platforms on Thursday, affecting Outlook, the Teams messaging app, the Copilot AI assistant and other Microsoft 365 services. By early afternoon, more than 120,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook on the Downdetector outage tracker, with many unable to send or receive email and experiencing delays.
Microsoft confirmed it was investigating the issue and said it was aware of users "experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas." The company later attributed part of the problem to a portion of its infrastructure "experiencing elevated load," which it said was likely contributing to connectivity errors. Microsoft announced it would begin "redistributing" traffic to help balance the load.
Earlier in the day, Microsoft reported that it had "successfully restored" Teams-related problems in North America, though some users continued to experience connectivity issues. No further details were provided at the time of reporting.