Thousands of Microsoft customers struggled to reach their email and work tools on Thursday, after a broad outage affected Outlook and other services. Reports about Outlook on the Downdetector tracking site rose to about 130,000 shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (18:00 GMT). Some users said messages were not being sent or received, while others could not open their inboxes.
By just before 3pm (20:00 GMT), the number of reports had dropped to about 77,000.
Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services affected
Users also had difficulty reaching Teams, the company’s workplace messaging app, and Copilot, its AI assistant, as well as other Microsoft 365 services. The company said the disruption could affect users in any region.
Microsoft works to restore servers and traffic
Microsoft said on X that servers had become unavailable and were failing automatic health checks, which put more strain on the systems still running. It said it was testing a configuration change to redistribute elevated traffic on parts of its infrastructure and restarting affected services.
“We’re working to safely return them to service,” the company said. Microsoft did not say when it expected services to be fully restored.
