Microsoft‘s Outlook email service suffered a massive outage Thursday, affecting users across North America and potentially other regions.
“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 return. 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 had been 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 is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.” The account also said the company has “begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load.”
“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” the company said at 2:12 p.m. ET. “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.” Microsoft said it “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. We’re working to safely return them to service.”
Variety has reached out to Microsoft for more information about the problems.
In January, the company said on its earnings call for the December 2025 quarter that Microsoft 365 commercial seats grew 6% year-over-year to over 450 million in the period.