Thousands of users affected as Microsoft works to restore services
Microsoft Outlook suffered a major global outage on Thursday, leaving thousands of users struggling to access their emails and connect to Microsoft Teams.
The disruption affected users across multiple countries, prompting Microsoft to launch an urgent investigation and implement measures to restore its services.
The technology giant initially reported investigating outage complaints in the United States but later confirmed that the disruption was affecting Microsoft 365 connectivity for users across all regions.
Microsoft attributed the problem to elevated load on its infrastructure, which disrupted access to several of its cloud-based services.
According to outage-tracking platform Downdetector, reports of service disruptions spread rapidly across 74 countries and territories within an hour.
Microsoft 365 is the company’s cloud-based subscription platform, which includes widely used applications such as Outlook, Microsoft Teams and other productivity tools.
Microsoft Takes Steps to Restore Services
In a series of updates posted on X, Microsoft outlined the steps being taken to address the disruption and minimise its impact on users.
The company confirmed that it had paused deployments, redirected additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure and begun restarting impacted servers to bring them back online.
Microsoft also reported signs of improvement, although full service restoration remained a work in progress.
In one of its updates, the company said it was “observing limited recovery”.
“As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect,” Microsoft added.
Full Recovery Timeline Remains Unclear
Despite the recovery efforts, Microsoft had not confirmed an estimated timeframe for the complete restoration of its services.
Users were advised that access could return gradually as infrastructure capacity improved and applications re-established their connections.
The outage highlighted the widespread reliance on Microsoft’s cloud-based services, with disruptions to Outlook and Teams potentially affecting communication, business operations and productivity across organisations worldwide.
Microsoft said it was continuing to monitor the situation and work towards restoring normal service.
