Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams ALL DOWN

Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams were down for thousands of users in several parts of the world today. This is according to the outage tracker Downdetector, and Microsoft says the problem may reach users in other regions.

Reuters reports that Downdetector logged more than 97,000 reports of problems with Outlook at 2:07 p.m. Eastern. There were more than 38,000 reports for Microsoft 365 and about 4,500 for Teams. Downdetector collects status reports from several sources, and the actual number of affected users may differ.

Microsoft said it is investigating problems accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. It first said the cause may be infrastructure under elevated load, and later said the load was not from more traffic but from a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which strained the remaining infrastructure.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”

Microsoft said it has paused all deployments, is moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure and is restarting affected servers to return them to service. It said it fixed an earlier Teams disruption affecting North America and that the impact was fully resolved. It later said the mailbox issue may also affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region.

The outage also hit AI tools that link to Microsoft services. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors in which new connections may be broken and tools are not working as expected. Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

Microsoft has not said when service will be fully restored.