Microsoft Said Servers Going Unexpectedly Offline Drove a Massive Outlook Outage

Microsoft's Outlook email service suffered a widespread outage Thursday that affected users across North America and, by the company's account, multiple regions, Variety reported.

The company's Microsoft 365 Status account on X said at 12:54 p.m. Eastern that it was investigating reports of users having trouble accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. Microsoft did not give an estimate for when service would return. Variety said both individual Outlook users and people on enterprise accounts had trouble logging in, and that Teams, Copilot 365 and SharePoint Online were also affected. "Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services," the company said on its Service Health Status page, according to Variety.

What Microsoft said went wrong

At 1:35 p.m. Eastern, the status account said a portion of infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, "which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," and that Microsoft had "begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load."

By 2:12 p.m. Eastern, Variety reported, the company said it was "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," had paused all deployments, was moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure and was restarting affected servers. Microsoft said it had "determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure."

The Verge, writing later in the incident, quoted a further update in which Microsoft said it had "completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure" and was still moving additional traffic off the affected systems and restarting servers. In that update, the company said it was also investigating whether the elevated traffic reflected a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic was being routed. The Verge said it was unclear how long restoration would take, and that the publication itself was having trouble consistently loading Microsoft's status pages.

How big the disruption looked

The two accounts differ slightly on when user reports spiked, a gap that may reflect when each outlet checked the monitors. Variety, citing Downdetector, said reports began rising around 12:39 p.m. Eastern and that more than 129,000 error reports had been logged by 1:09 p.m. Eastern. The Verge said reports started to spike just before 1 p.m. Eastern and had not completely gone away at the time of its story. The Verge also noted some reports of Teams problems, but said most people reporting issues indicated Teams was still working by then.

Variety said Microsoft was not providing an estimated time for a return to normal service when it asked, and that it had reached out to the company for more information. In a separate piece of context, Variety noted that on its earnings call for the December 2025 quarter, Microsoft said Microsoft 365 commercial seats grew 6% year over year to more than 450 million.