Microsoft Outlook Outage Disrupts Email, Teams and Microsoft 365
A Microsoft outage on Thursday disrupted Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365 across North America, with Google and AWS users also reporting issues.
Microsoft suffered a widespread outage on Thursday that affected thousands of users in North America, disrupting Outlook, Teams and Microsoft 365, according to outage-tracking site Downdetector. Amazon Web Services and Google users also reported outages on the site.
The outage began shortly before 1 p.m. ET. Microsoft's Microsoft 365 Status account said on X that a portion of infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which was likely contributing to connectivity errors.
The company determined the outage was caused by an increase in unavailable servers and launched a restart of impacted servers. The shutdown may be linked to failed health checks caused by a specific component responsible for processing server health, Microsoft added. It took steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while working to return affected servers to service.
Microsoft has not identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of the impact, and it is still unclear how long it will take before access is restored. As of 3:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft was deploying a targeted change to bypass the affected component on a subset of servers to validate whether that restores availability, while also investigating why affected servers were experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
Reports of issues with Outlook started to spike just before 1 p.m. ET on Downdetector and had not completely gone away by the time of the latest update. Some users also reported problems with Teams, though some said Teams was still working. Microsoft's own status pages were also difficult to load consistently during the incident, according to The Verge.
Shares of Microsoft (MSFT) were up 0.36% in delayed trading; Alphabet (GOOGL) was up 1.79% and Amazon (AMZN) up 0.48%.