Microsoft’s Outlook email service suffered a massive outage on Thursday, affecting users across North America and potentially other regions.
“We are investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple sign-in methods in the Americas,” the company’s Microsoft 365 Status account posted to X at 12:54 p.m. ET.
Microsoft did not provide an estimate for when the service will return. Individual Outlook users and those with corporate accounts have experienced issues connecting to the service. The outage also affected other Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams, the Copilot 365 AI service, and SharePoint Online. “Users may be unable to sign in to multiple Microsoft 365 services,” the company said on its Service Health page.
User reports of problems with Microsoft Outlook began to increase around 12:39 p.m. ET, according to monitoring platform Downdetector. As of 1:09 p.m. ET, more than 129,000 error reports have been logged with Downdetector.
At 1:35 p.m. ET, the Microsoft 365 Status account provided an update: “We have determined that part of the infrastructure is experiencing high load in several regions, which is likely contributing to connectivity errors. The account also says the company has “begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader global infrastructure to help balance the load.”
“We are actively exploring all avenues to reduce the impact,” the company said at 2:12 p.m. ET. “We have paused all deployments, are removing additional traffic from the affected infrastructure, and are restarting the affected servers to return them to service.” Microsoft said it had “determined that the high load is not due to an increase in traffic, but to a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, putting a strain on the remaining infrastructure. We are working to safely return them to service.”
Variety contacted Microsoft for more information on the issues.
In January, the company said during its December 2025 quarter earnings call that Microsoft 365 business seats increased 6% year over year to more than 450 million during the period.
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