Microsoft Outage Disrupts Email, Workplace Apps

A Microsoft 365 outage disrupted access to email and workplace applications Thursday as the company worked to restore service. 

Outage tracker Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems Thursday afternoon, according to the Associated Press. Thousands of reports also involved Teams, Copilot, and other Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft was still working to restore affected servers just after 4:30 p.m. ET, when it said it was also considering reversing recent configuration updates to speed recovery.

“We’re actively restarting and validating the affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we’re assessing whether reverting a small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery,” Microsoft said.

The company acknowledged problems accessing Exchange Online, its cloud email service, shortly before 1 p.m. ET.

“We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” the company reported. 

Microsoft later said the issue may affect Microsoft 365 users in any region. The company initially cited elevated load on part of its infrastructure, then explained that servers had unexpectedly become unavailable, shifting the burden to those still operating.

The company paused deployments, redirected traffic, and restarted affected servers as it tried to restore access.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service.”