Microsoft Probes Major Outlook, Teams Outage Hitting Americas Users

Microsoft is investigating a major outage that disrupted Outlook email, Teams chats and other Microsoft 365 services for hundreds of thousands of people across the Americas on Thursday afternoon, snarling workplace communications and access to inboxes.^[1]

Reports of trouble with Outlook began surging just after 1 p.m. Eastern, with outage-tracking site Downdetector logging nearly 130,000 user complaints about being unable to send, receive or search email. Microsoft said the problems stemmed from Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas facing "elevated load" and unexpected server unavailability linked to the company's automated health checks, which are designed to monitor the system's status.^[1]

In updates posted to its public status pages, Microsoft said engineers were testing a fix and rolling out an alternative health-check mechanism intended to prevent the monitoring tools themselves from knocking servers offline. The company said related performance issues were also affecting Teams messaging, Microsoft's Copilot artificial intelligence assistant and other Microsoft 365 cloud services used widely by businesses, schools and government agencies.^[1]

Thursday's disruption is the latest reminder of how dependent workplaces and institutions have become on Microsoft's cloud platforms, where a problem in a single region can quickly ripple across email, chat, video meetings and AI tools. The company did not immediately provide a precise timeline for full restoration, but said users might see gradual improvement as traffic is shifted, alternative checks are deployed and affected servers are brought back online.^[1]

1. NPR