Microsoft reported a widespread service outage on Thursday that affected several of its major platforms, including the Outlook email service and the Teams messaging application. Users across the Americas reported difficulties sending and receiving emails, loading inboxes, and accessing other services within the Microsoft 365 suite.
The company stated that the disruptions were linked to infrastructure experiencing "elevated load" and servers becoming "unexpectedly unavailable." According to Microsoft, these servers failed during "automated health checks," though the specific cause of the failure was not immediately identified.
At the peak of the event shortly after 1 p.m. ET, the outage tracker Downdetector recorded nearly 130,000 reports of problems accessing Outlook. In addition to email and Teams, users reported issues with the AI assistant Copilot and general Microsoft 365 services. Microsoft later announced it was testing a fix and implementing an alternative method for server health checks to restore service.
A person experiencing this outage would notice a direct failure in their ability to perform daily tasks, such as being unable to load an inbox or failing to send time-sensitive messages via Teams or Outlook. These errors began appearing on Thursday afternoon, causing an immediate halt to workflows that depend on Microsoft's cloud-based ecosystem. For organizations using Microsoft 365, this represents a temporary loss of access to internal communications and data management tools.
Microsoft indicated it is "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact" and has begun rolling out fixes for the impacted servers. While the company stated it had "successfully restored" some Teams functionality in North America earlier in the day, some connectivity issues persisted for various users. The company has not yet reported a specific deadline for a full resolution of all services or provided a public explanation for why the automated health checks failed initially.