Microsoft experiences global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365

Thousands of users around the world reported problems on Thursday accessing Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services, in an outage that the company itself attributed to "high load" on part of its infrastructure. Microsoft confirmed the incident via its official status account, @MSFT365Status, and identified it under the code EX1550543.

The outage began with difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas, but Microsoft later expanded the notice to indicate that the issue could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity "for users in any region." Users reported errors when sending and receiving emails, loading inboxes, and connecting to Teams, Copilot, OneDrive and Azure.

Society

Microsoft is offering voluntary layoffs to 60,000 employees to cut costs and invest in AI

AFP

What Microsoft said

The company explained that the outage was not due to an increase in traffic, but rather because several servers became "unexpectedly unavailable," which overloaded the remaining infrastructure. "We are working to safely bring them back online," Microsoft stated in an update.

To mitigate the impact, Microsoft paused all deployments, rerouted traffic to other infrastructure, and restarted the affected servers. The company also indicated that it was investigating an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it was contributing to the high load.

Politics

Vance announces Microsoft's suspension from H-1B visa program due to alleged fraud

Williams Perdomo

Impact on users and businesses

Downdetector recorded tens of thousands of outage reports for Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot and Azure on Thursday afternoon. By 2:07 p.m. ET, the platform had recorded more than 97,000 reports about Outlook, more than 38,000 about Microsoft 365, and about 4,500 about Teams.

The outage affected individual users as well as businesses and government agencies that rely on Microsoft services for email, collaboration and virtual meetings. Microsoft had previously reported that the issues with Teams in North America had been resolved, although some users continued to report connection difficulties.

Tech & Science

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and 130 other companies warn: A wave of AI-powered cyberattacks is coming

Emmanuel Alejandro Rondón

What users should do

Microsoft recommended that IT administrators check the Microsoft 365 admin center, under the Service Status section to check the incident EX1550543 and receive real-time updates. The company also noted that no configuration changes were necessary on users' devices or tenants.

The company did not specify when service will be fully restored, but assured users that it is "aggressively pursuing all avenues to mitigate the impact." Users can follow updates on the incident on Microsoft's official status page and on the @MSFT365Status on X.