Microsoft outage hits Outlook. AWS and Google users also report issues

At approximately 10:40 am ET on a Thursday morning, Microsoft announced on its 365 status page that it was "investigating reports of users experiencing issues when accessing or using Microsoft Teams functionality in North America." By approximately 1 pm ET, the company confirmed it was aware of "issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas."

Microsoft also mentioned that its network was experiencing "elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," but clarified that the issue stemmed from servers going offline rather than increased traffic.

Within an hour, Microsoft reported that it had "begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load" and was "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact." The company paused all deployments, redirected additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and restarted servers to restore them to service.

Microsoft's status page update indicated that impacted services might include Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, and Microsoft Defender XDR. A spokesperson for Microsoft told WIRED that they were aware of and investigating reports of users experiencing problems with Microsoft 365 services, particularly issues with Exchange Online. They expressed appreciation for customers' patience while they worked to restore services as soon as possible.

Downdetector's outage reports began falling around 1:15 pm ET after a significant surge in users reporting issues with Outlook and other Microsoft 365 products around noon. The current timeline of when the outage might end or its cause remains unclear. In their latest X post, Microsoft stated that "a problem" was "causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable" but they were attempting to reboot their systems to hopefully bring them back online.

While frequent, major outages in cloud services can stem from various causes like configuration errors, Domain Name System resolution issues, or cyberattacks; there is currently no evidence that a cyberattack caused the current Microsoft outage.

Major Microsoft outages are relatively rare but not unheard of, as demonstrated by a corrupted update from security firm Crowdstrike in July 2024, which knocked out Microsoft Azure services for several hours, resulting in potentially millions of dollars in lost revenue for companies due to their inability to function normally.