Microsoft 365, Outlook down for thousands of US users, Downdetector shows

Microsoft Outlook email service experienced widespread disruptions globally on Thursday, according to reports gathered from various users. The email service malfunction, which impacted message sending and receiving, was acknowledged by Microsoft's status website in the afternoon. The issue, categorized as a "service degradation," affected users' ability to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods.

Microsoft had initiated an investigation into the matter, gathering extensive networking logs to determine the root cause and outline the subsequent steps. Downdetector, a popular platform tracking internet outages, reported a similar surge of complaints about Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and Teams, suggesting a possible ripple effect across Microsoft's suite of tools.

Microsoft attempted to mitigate the situation by redistributing connection traffic across its extensive worldwide infrastructure to alleviate the load. By 2:10 PM, some users began to notice a recovery in service availability. This story is still unfolding, and further developments will be reported as they become available.