Microsoft Outlook outage disrupts services in 74 countries

Microsoft's Outlook email service went down across the world on Thursday, with tens of thousands of users unable to access their inboxes. The US technology company said the problem was linked to elevated load on its infrastructure. The disruption lasted through much of the American workday and also hit the Teams collaboration platform and the Copilot AI assistant. Because Outlook is widely used for work, such an outage can interfere with daily communication at businesses and institutions.

Downdetector, a service that tracks user-reported outages, said the problems spread globally within an hour and affected Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories. A map it posted on X showed users hit in the Americas and in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Microsoft's explanation

Microsoft first said it was investigating reports of an outage in the Americas, but later acknowledged that the issue apparently affected Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region. Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes applications such as Outlook and Teams.

On X, the company said part of its infrastructure was under elevated load across multiple regions, which was likely causing the connection errors. It said it was aggressively pursuing every path to reduce the impact: all deployments had been paused, traffic was being moved off the affected infrastructure, and affected servers were being restarted.

Scale of the disruption

According to Downdetector, about 130,000 users in the United States reported Outlook problems shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT). By 6 pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT), reports had fallen to about 37,000. Thousands of users also reported trouble with Teams and Copilot.

Microsoft posted a series of updates on X describing continued but so far unsuccessful attempts to restore full service. Shortly after 6 pm Eastern Time, it said it was observing limited recovery as it worked to route traffic away from affected servers. As capacity returns, the company added, users may see a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect.