Microsoft Outlook appeared to be suffering a major outage Thursday, with more than 130,000 reports of issues according to Downdetector as of 1:15 p.m. ET.
Other Microsoft services also seemed to be down, including Microsoft 365, which saw nearly 50,000 reports on Downdetector. Microsoft’s AI assistant and chatbot, Copilot, was also down.
Microsoft’s service status page at one point appeared not to be loading. CNET has reached out to Microsoft for more information.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Microsoft is restarting affected servers
Microsoft reports in a new update posted just before noon PT that the company is “testing a configuration change to address a problem that’s causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable.”
The company says, “we’ve initiated a restart of all affected servers and are monitoring health as they return to service.”
Or, as one X user noted, “so basically you’re turning it off and turning it back on.”
Another update from Microsoft
The latest from Microsoft’s status page is that the company is trying a few things to try to fix the problem… or at least keep it from getting worse: “As a precaution, we’ve paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We’ve also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.”
Can’t answer email? Go to Reddit
The r/Outlook subreddit is busy, even if the emails are not flying.
In one thread, users weighed whether an Outlook outage was the “adult version of a snow day” and discussed… what’s for lunch.
Then there are people who have access to only one Microsoft service: Teams. Teams, the app your boss uses to message you vague things. “Teams is the only thing I wish was always down,” one user lamented.
Microsoft’s status page is loading now
I was finally able to pull up Microsoft’s service status page. It’s showing a general alert that users might not be able to connect to multiple services, naming Exchange Online, Teams, Sharepoint Online, Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR.
“We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we’ve determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” Microsoft’s update said. “We’re restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it’s contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we’re evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.”
There are some broken connections
With some of Microsoft’s services seeing issues, other services that connect with Microsoft are reporting problems of their own. OpenAI and Anthropic are both saying they’re having issues with connectors between their chatbot and AI services and Microsoft 365.
“Mail, calendar and search tools are failing for most requests, and new connections to the connector may not complete,” Anthropic’s update said. “We are in contact with them and will provide an update as soon as possible.”
