Update:
After a major disruption, Microsoft confirms services like Outlook, Teams, and 365 are back online.
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For businesses that rely on cloud tools to keep daily operations running, even a brief disruption can have a wide impact. That reality played out on Thursday when users across regions began reporting problems with Microsoft 365, one of the world’s most widely used enterprise productivity platforms.
TL;DR
- Microsoft 365 suffered a major outage affecting Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
- The issue originated from a portion of the North American infrastructure not processing traffic properly.
- Microsoft is working to restore services but has not shared a timeline for full recovery.
- Downdetector recorded over 10,000 outage reports, with users citing email delays and access issues.
Microsoft acknowledged the issue around 2:30 p.m. in a post on X, saying the outage was linked to a “portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected.” While the company did not disclose the exact cause, it said teams were “working to restore the infrastructure to a healthy state to achieve recovery.”
According to Microsoft’s service status page, the outage affected Exchange Online email, file searches across SharePoint Online and OneDrive, and key functions in Microsoft Teams, including chats, meetings, and adding participants. The disruption also extended to administrative and security tools, preventing admins from accessing Microsoft Purview, Defender XDR dashboards, and admin centers.
Downdetector, which tracks user-reported outages, logged at least 10,000 reports at the time of writing. Some users also flagged slow or stalled email delivery. While Amazon Web Services appeared on Downdetector during the same window, AWS confirmed on its own status page that there were no service issues.
In a brief follow-up statement, Microsoft confirmed the scale of the problem. “We're investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Further information can be found in the admin center under MO1221364,” the company said on X.
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Microsoft has not shared an estimated time for full restoration. Based on past incidents, recovery could take several hours once mitigation steps are fully applied.
User reactions reflected growing frustration. “More than 14,000 users have reported an issue with Microsoft Outlook. Nearly 10,000 users reported problems with Microsoft 365, 1,5000 for the Microsoft Store, and 800 for Microsoft Teams,” one person tweeted.
Another wrote, “There is an unreported Microsoft Office 365/Exchange Online issue right now.. Emails are going out slowly, Nothing incoming. Down Detector showing massive spike in issues the last hour. No word from Microsoft yet.”
As Microsoft works toward recovery, customers remain in wait-and-watch mode. Until services are fully restored, disruptions may continue across Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 tools.
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