Microsoft is investigating a widespread outage affecting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot, as users report connectivity problems worldwide.
BleepingComputer has received numerous reports from users experiencing problems accessing Microsoft's services, including complaints that Outlook is down. According to Downdetector, which tracks user-submitted outage reports, complaints surged Thursday afternoon across numerous Microsoft services, including Outlook, Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, Azure, OneDrive, and the Microsoft Store.
In a Microsoft 365 admin center advisory tracked as MO1550821, Microsoft confirmed that customers may be unable to connect to multiple services, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and Microsoft Defender XDR.
The company says the Microsoft 365 incident began Thursday at 1:26 PM ET, although it began investigating reports of Exchange Online mailbox connectivity problems in the Americas earlier in the day. Microsoft initially attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure load across multiple regions, but has determined that the problem was caused by servers unexpectedly becoming unavailable.
"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. We're working to safely return them to service," Microsoft said in an update on X.
The company says it has paused all deployments, redistributed connection traffic across its worldwide infrastructure, and is moving additional traffic away from affected systems to reduce load. Microsoft is also restarting affected servers to restore capacity and return services to normal operation.
While the company initially reported Exchange Online connectivity problems in the Americas, it later confirmed that users in any region could be affected. The outage follows a separate Microsoft Teams incident earlier Thursday that caused an outage for users in North and South America. That earlier incident, tracked as TM1550488, lasted from 9:45 AM to 10:53 AM ET and caused delays or failures when sending messages, errors creating or updating conversations, and problems retrieving chat messages.
Microsoft attributed the earlier Teams disruption to resource contention within its infrastructure, which led to elevated resource utilization and prevented the service from processing messaging requests normally. The company says the earlier Teams incident has been fully resolved. Microsoft has not indicated whether the two incidents are related, and the ongoing Microsoft 365 outage has not yet been resolved.
