Microsoft reports global Outlook and Microsoft 365 outage, begins traffic redistribution

Microsoft said a technical issue was causing a broad service degradation across its Microsoft 365 suite, including Outlook email, Teams, Copilot and related tools. 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.

Downdetector reported outages for users in multiple regions, and the firm classified the Outlook problem as a "service degradation." In a later update, Microsoft indicated that the elevated load was not due to increased traffic but to several servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable.

To address the disruption, Microsoft announced it was redistributing connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure to balance the load and was "re-isolating a portion of infrastructure" while restarting certain components. The company also said it was temporarily limiting some traffic types to affected locations as it analyzed diagnostic data.

The outage impacted government agencies and businesses, prompting statements such as the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget noting delayed email responses due to a widescale Microsoft 365 outage in North America. As of early afternoon, some services began to recover, though Microsoft warned that restored servers could become unresponsive as traffic resumed.

"We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load," Microsoft said.

"We determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable," the company added.

"We're analyzing diagnostic data to determine what's triggering the behavior ... in parallel, we're temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in some location," Microsoft posted on X.