Microsoft Outlook Outage Disrupts Global Email Access for Business and Personal Users

Microsoft experienced a significant global outage on Thursday that prevented users from accessing Outlook email inboxes, forcing the company to redistribute traffic across its worldwide infrastructure to restore service.

Reports of connectivity issues began to spike around 1:00 p.m. ET, affecting both web and mobile applications for users across the Americas and other international regions.

The disruption impacted critical business operations, as the outage extended to other Microsoft 365 services including Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, and Microsoft Defender XDR.

A Microsoft spokesperson addressed the situation in a statement to WIRED, saying, "We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online."

The company added, "We appreciate our customer's patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible."

Microsoft initially identified the problem as an elevated load on its infrastructure, but later clarified that the root cause involved servers failing automated health checks and becoming unavailable.

To mitigate the impact, engineers halted all software deployments and began restarting the affected servers to bring them back online.

Regarding the technical response, Microsoft stated, "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."

While users reported difficulties accessing Microsoft status pages to track progress, the company maintained that there is no indication that a cyberattack caused the current outage.

It remains unclear when full access will be restored to all affected users or if the current rebooting efforts will resolve every connectivity error reported globally.