A Microsoft logo and sign outside the Microsoft Visitor Center are seen at the company’s headquarters Monday, Nov. 9, 2026, in Redmond, Washington.
Lindsey Wasson/AP
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Lindsey Wasson/AP
A widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, on Thursday, with many users experiencing difficulties using their email accounts and other errors in the tech giant’s suite of applications.
Nearly 130,000 users of the Downdetector outage tracking system reported problems accessing Outlook just after 1 p.m. ET. New reports have since fallen off that high, but many said they couldn’t send and receive emails or had trouble loading their inbox.
Thousands of people have also reported issues with Microsoft’s workplace messaging app, Teams, as well as its AI assistant Copilot and broader Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft has indicated that it is investigating disruptions, particularly related to its messaging and Teams applications.
In updates posted to social media, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said it was aware of users “experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple sign-in methods in the Americas.”
Microsoft explained that part of its infrastructure was “undergoing high load” – which it said was “likely contributing to connectivity errors.” The company determined that a number of servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” due to an issue that caused them to crash during “automated health checks.”
The exact cause of the failure was not immediately clear. But Microsoft later said it was testing a fix and rolling out an alternative method for these checks to bring affected servers back online.
“We are actively investigating all avenues to reduce the impact,” the Microsoft 365 Status account wrote on X.
Earlier today, the company said it had “successfully restored” issues with Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.
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