Major outage hits Microsoft Outlook

WASHINGTON: Microsoft Outlook suffered a major outage across multiple regions on Thursday, with tens of thousands of users struggling to access their email as the company said it was working "aggressively" to reduce the impact.

Microsoft attributed the connectivity issues to "elevated load" on its infrastructure across multiple regions. The disruption also appeared to affect other Microsoft products.

The company initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas", but later said it had "confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region".

Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.

According to outage tracker Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook shortly after 1pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT).

Outage reports have since declined, with about 50,000 users reporting issues with Outlook as of 4.30pm Eastern Time (2130 GMT).

"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company wrote on X.

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it said.

"We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service."

Other Microsoft services also appeared to be affected, with thousands of users reporting issues with Teams and the AI assistant Copilot, according to Downdetector.