Microsoft Outage Knocks Out Outlook, Teams and Copilot for Users in 74 Countries

Microsoft Outlook and several of the company's other flagship services suffered a worldwide outage on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of people struggling to reach their email and disrupting access across 74 countries and territories.

The company blamed the disruption on unusually heavy strain on its systems, citing "elevated load" on part of its infrastructure, and said engineers were working aggressively to reduce the impact. Hours later, however, recovery remained limited.

The outage went global within the span of about an hour, knocking out Microsoft products in 74 countries and territories, according to outage tracker Downdetector. A map the tracker posted on X showed affected users across the Americas and in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa.

Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas," but later confirmed the problem apparently affected "Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region." Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service, which bundles popular applications such as Outlook and the Teams collaboration platform.

"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company wrote on X. "We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact."

"We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service," it added.

In the United States, roughly 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT), according to Downdetector. The volume of reports later declined, with about 37,000 users still flagging problems as of 6 pm Eastern Time (2300 GMT). Thousands of users also reported trouble with Teams and Copilot, Microsoft's AI assistant.

As the disruption dragged on for hours, Microsoft posted a series of updates on X detailing continued but unsuccessful efforts to restore full service. In one update shortly after 6 pm Eastern Time, the company said it was "observing limited recovery" as it sought to route user traffic away from affected servers.

"As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect," the company added.