Microsoft’s Outlook email service suffered a massive outage on Thursday, affecting users across North America and potentially other regions. “We are investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes across multiple connection methods in the Americas,” the company’s Microsoft 365 Status account posted on X at 12:54 p.m. ET. Microsoft did not provide an estimated time when it expects service to be restored. Both individual Outlook users and those with business accounts experienced issues signing in to the service. The outage also affected other Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams, the Copilot 365 AI service, and SharePoint Online. “Users may not be able to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services,” the company said on its Service Status page. User reports of problems with Microsoft Outlook began to increase around 12:39 p.m. ET, according to monitoring platform Downdetector. As of 1:09 pm ET, more than 129,000 bug reports had been logged with Downdetector. At 1:35 p.m. ET, the Microsoft 365 Health account provided an update: “We have determined that a portion of the infrastructure is experiencing high load in multiple regions, which is likely contributing to connectivity errors.” The account also said the company has “begun redistributing connecting traffic across our broader global infrastructure to help balance the load.” “We are aggressively pursuing all avenues to reduce the impact,” the company said at 2:12 p.m. ET. “We have paused all deployments, are moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and are rebooting the affected servers back into service.” Microsoft said it “determined that the elevated load is not due to an increase in traffic, but rather because several servers are unexpectedly unavailable, overloading the remaining infrastructure. We are working to safely return them to service.” Variety has contacted Microsoft for more information about the issues. In January, the company said in its earnings call for the December 2025 quarter that Microsoft 365 commercial seats grew 6% year over year to more than 450 million in the period. Last month, Microsoft offered voluntary buyouts to about 60,000 employees, about a quarter of its total workforce, as the company (like other big tech companies) looks to cut costs while spending big on artificial intelligence infrastructure. According to Microsoft, between 3% and 5% of employees in the technology industry usually accept these types of purchase offers.
