Outlook outage: Microsoft reports 'issues' with Teams and email

Microsoft is currently experiencing disruptions with its Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and email services, according to reports on social media. The company stated that users are having difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes via multiple connection methods in the Americas. Initially, Microsoft suggested that the Exchange Online mailbox issues might be caused by infrastructure facing high loads across different regions.

However, they later clarified that the high load was not due to an increase in traffic, but rather a few servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which strained the remaining infrastructure. No recent changes were identified as a cause for the impact. Microsoft is investigating a specific component responsible for processing server health checks, which may be the source of the failed health checks.

The company has taken measures to prevent further servers from being impacted while they work to restore service to the affected servers. Regarding Microsoft Teams, Microsoft reported that they have successfully restored service health and functionality. Downdetector, a service that monitors outages, also reported issues with Microsoft Teams and Outlook on Thursday.

Microsoft has confirmed that the issue affecting Exchange Online mailboxes may impact Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region. The company is actively pursuing all possible pathways to reduce the impact and has paused all deployments, redirected traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and restarted servers to return them to service.