Global Outage Disrupts Microsoft Outlook Services

Microsoft Outlook experienced a major global outage on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of users unable to access their emails. The company said it was working “aggressively” to minimise the disruption and restore services.

Microsoft attributed the outage to an “elevated load” on its infrastructure, with disruptions continuing for much of the US working day. The problem also affected other Microsoft products, including Teams and its AI assistant Copilot. According to outage-tracking website Downdetector, the disruption spread worldwide within an hour, affecting Microsoft services across 74 countries and territories.

A map shared by Downdetector on X showed widespread disruptions across the Americas, as well as parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Microsoft initially said it was investigating reports of service interruptions in the Americas but later acknowledged that the issue appeared to be affecting Microsoft 365 connectivity across all regions.

Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription platform, which includes widely used applications such as Outlook and Teams.

“We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” Microsoft said in a post on X, adding that it was exploring all possible measures to minimise the impact.

The company said it had suspended all deployments, redirected additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure and begun restarting impacted servers to restore services.

In the United States, approximately 130,000 users reported Outlook-related problems shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT), according to Downdetector. The number of reports subsequently declined, with around 37,000 users still reporting issues by 6pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT).

Thousands of users also reported difficulties accessing Microsoft Teams and Copilot, the outage tracker said.

As the disruption continued for several hours, Microsoft issued multiple updates on X, outlining its ongoing efforts to restore normal operations.

In an update shortly after 6pm Eastern Time, the company said it was “observing limited recovery” while attempting to redirect user traffic away from the affected servers.

Microsoft cautioned that service restoration could take time, noting that users might experience a gradual recovery as their applications reconnect once infrastructure capacity becomes available.