Microsoft Outlook outage hits users worldwide as fix stalls
A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services on Thursday, with the company saying repair efforts were not working as expected overnight.
A global outage hit Microsoft Outlook on Thursday, disrupting email access for users in dozens of countries. The company said overnight that its repair efforts were “not working as expected,” leaving many without service into Friday morning.
According to Downdetector, the outage spread worldwide within an hour, affecting Microsoft services in 74 countries and regions. At its peak around 19:00 CET, nearly 130,000 problems with Outlook were reported; by midnight the number had fallen to about 37,000. Users in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa reported issues.
Microsoft 365 first confirmed the incident on X, initially saying it was investigating reports of users unable to access Exchange Online mailboxes “through various connection methods in America.” It later acknowledged the problem could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in all regions.
The outage also hit other Microsoft services, including Teams and the AI assistant Copilot, with thousands of error reports for both. In the United States, the disruption lasted most of the working day, with more than 39,000 reports on Downdetector at 19:00 local time.
Microsoft said that part of its infrastructure in several regions was experiencing high usage, which likely contributed to connection errors. The company said it had suspended all deployments, redirected additional traffic away from affected infrastructure, and restarted affected servers. “We are working diligently to explore all options to mitigate the impact,” the company wrote on X.
Earlier on Thursday, Microsoft had resolved an incident affecting its Teams messaging service in North America. Reuters reported that Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams were unavailable for thousands of users in the US, and that the problem also affected connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic AI services.
No timeline has been given for a full fix, and Microsoft has not said whether Romanian users were specifically affected, though the outage was global in scope.
