Microsoft outage disrupts Outlook and other services

Microsoft first said the problem was primarily affecting mailboxes in the Americas. At 12:54 p.m. ET, its Microsoft 365 Status account on X said it was investigating reports of users having difficulty accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in that region.

In a later update on X, Microsoft said the issue might affect Microsoft 365 connectivity in any region and directed administrators to service alert EX1550543 for more information. The company also said part of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which was likely contributing to connection errors.

DownDetector reports began climbing sharply around 12:30 p.m. ET. Reports were also elevated for Microsoft 365, Copilot and Teams, though it was not clear whether those reports reflected separate service disruptions. Mashable reporters also could not load Microsoft's service status page at the time of publication.

Microsoft has not identified the cause of the problem in the cited updates. Outlook experienced a widespread outage in August, which the company attributed to a misconfiguration that prevented authentication components from deploying correctly. The Thursday outage was still developing.