Global Microsoft 365 outage hits Outlook and Teams as company restarts servers
Microsoft 365 users worldwide reported trouble accessing Outlook, Teams and other apps. The company says a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable and it is restarting them.
Users of Microsoft 365, the technology company's suite of office and collaboration software, faced access problems around the world, including with the Outlook email program and the Teams communication platform. Microsoft said it was "aggressively pursuing all pathways" to resolve the issue.
Down Detector, a website that tracks user-reported service failures, showed a peak of nearly 130,000 reports. The problems affected Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, as well as enterprise services such as SharePoint and OneDrive. The AI assistant Copilot was also affected. New reports have since fallen from the peak, but many users said they still could not send or receive emails, or could not load their inboxes at all.
What Microsoft says
On X, the company said it was investigating reports of users having trouble reaching Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods. Microsoft later explained that part of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load, which was likely contributing to the connectivity errors.
The company determined that a number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable because of a problem that made them fail automated checks. In a service degradation alert, Microsoft said it was restarting the affected servers to return them to service.
As a precaution, it has paused all deployments and configuration changes while it reviews recent changes for any link to the event. Microsoft stressed that the elevated load was not caused by an overall rise in traffic, but by many servers being unavailable, which shifted load onto the remaining infrastructure. It is still investigating why the servers are becoming unavailable.
Earlier, the company said it had successfully restored Teams-related problems in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.
