Microsoft Outlook Service Faces Major Outage Across Americas
Microsoft confirmed a widespread outage affecting its Outlook email service and other tools in North America on Thursday afternoon.
Outage Impacts Multiple Services
Users across the Americas reported login failures for individual and enterprise accounts starting at 12:39 p.m. ET. The Microsoft 365 Status account on X noted issues with Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods. Problems also spread to Microsoft Teams, cloud storage, and the Copilot AI service by early afternoon.
Infrastructure Load Causes Errors
At 1:35 p.m. ET, officials stated elevated load across regions likely caused the connectivity errors seen globally. More than 129,000 error reports were logged with Downdetector by 1:09 p.m. ET according to Variety. Microsoft began redistributing connection traffic to balance the load on their worldwide infrastructure immediately.
Engineers Restart Affected Servers
The company later announced it completed redistributing traffic and is moving additional loads off affected systems. Engineers are restarting servers to return them to service while investigating traffic routing shifts. It remains unclear how long access will take to fully restore for all users.
All 2 outlets report consistently
No differences in figures, names or dates across these reports.
- Variety
- The Verge
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2 independent outlets. Headlines as published. Links open the original report.