The operational disruption escalated rapidly on Thursday around 12:39 p.m. ET, generating over 129,000 incident reports on Downdetector within thirty minutes. While email access was primary hit, the connectivity failures also extended into Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and the Copilot 365 AI service. Engineers identified the root cause as severe regional server unavailability that caused an unsustainable load spike on surviving systems. In response, technical teams paused active software deployments, re-routed global network traffic, and initiated server restarts without providing an immediate estimated resolution time.
Key points
Unexpected server dropouts caused an elevated load that strained remaining infrastructure…: Unexpected server dropouts caused an elevated load that strained remaining infrastructure across multiple regions.
The widespread system outage disrupted individual and business users across North America…: The widespread system outage disrupted individual and business users across North America and potentially other global territories.
Microsoft had not established an estimated time of full recovery while operations to rest…: Microsoft had not established an estimated time of full recovery while operations to restore server capacity were ongoing.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Microsoft‘s Outlook email service suffered a massive outage Thursday, affecting users across North America and potentially other regions for several hours.
“We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” the company’s Microsoft 365 Status account on X posted at 12:54 p.m. ET.
Microsoft was not providing an estimated time by which it expects service to be restored. Both individual Outlook users and those on enterprise accounts experienced problems logging in 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 connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services,” the company said on its Service Health Status page.
User reports of problems with Microsoft Outlook began spiking at around 12:39 p.m. ET, according to monitoring platform Downdetector. As of 1:09 p.m. ET, more than 129,000 error reports were logged with Downdetector.
At 1:35 p.m. ET, the Microsoft 365 Status account provided an update: “We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which…
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