Microsoft reported issues with users’ Exchange Online mailboxes and an issue with Microsoft Teams, according to posts on social media Thursday.
“We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” the company wrote, after first reporting “users experiencing issues when accessing or using Microsoft Teams functionality in North America.”
The company initially said the issues involving Exchange Online mailboxes could be due to infrastructure “experiencing elevated load across multiple regions.”
Microsoft later clarified, “We determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”
The company said around 4 p.m. Thursday that it believes its latest attempt to fix the issue showed signs of being successful.
“We’ve validated an alternative service health check method, which allowed a subset of affected servers to successfully return to service. We’re now applying this change more broadly,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We’re also preparing automated recovery systems to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to maintain service stability while this change progresses.”
Outlook has been down for a few hours as Microsoft attempted to deploy several fixes.
“We’ve not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that’s responsible for processing server health,” Microsoft previously said. “We’ve taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service.”
Regarding the issues with Microsoft Teams, the company followed up shortly after first reporting the issue, writing, “Our mitigative actions have successfully restored service health and functionality.”
Microsoft 365 apps.
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Downdetector, which monitors outages, reported issues with both Microsoft Teams and Outlook, among other products on Thursday.
Regarding the issues affecting Exchange Online mailboxes, the company added, “we’ve confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.”
The company continued to provide updates on the potential fix to the mailbox issue on Thursday, and added, “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.