Major Microsoft Outlook Outage Leaves People With Email Jobs Unable to Email
Microsoft's 365 business and enterprise services suffered a major outage on Thursday, preventing users from accessing their accounts across North America.
The disruption began around 10:40 am ET on Thursday when Microsoft first reported investigating issues with Teams functionality in North America. By just before 1pm ET, the company acknowledged problems accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods across the Americas.
Service Impact
Microsoft later confirmed that its network was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, though the issue stemmed from servers going offline rather than increased traffic. The company began redistributing connection traffic worldwide and paused all deployments while restarting affected servers.
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.
Affected Services
Impacted services included Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, and Microsoft Defender XDR. Reports on Downdetector showed a spike in users experiencing issues around noon, with reports beginning to fall around 1:15 pm ET.
Microsoft stated in a status update that a problem was causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable. The company is attempting to reboot systems to restore services, though the exact resolution timeline remains unclear.
Historical Context
While major Microsoft outages are relatively rare, they are not unprecedented. In July 2024, a corrupted update from Crowdstrike knocked out Microsoft Azure services for hours, causing significant financial losses for businesses unable to function normally.
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