A widespread Microsoft 365 outage knocked out email and workplace applications for users globally on Thursday.
Tracking site Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports of Outlook problems Thursday afternoon, with thousands more flagging issues across Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services.
The disruption began shortly before 1 p.m. ET when users could no longer access Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. The issue quickly expanded to any region, with the company initially citing elevated load before explaining servers unexpectedly became unavailable and shifted the burden to those still operating.
Microsoft paused all deployments and redirected traffic while restarting affected servers just after 4:30 p.m. ET. The company weighed reversing a small number of recent configuration updates to accelerate recovery and emphasized steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted.