A Microsoft logo and sign outside the Microsoft Visitor Center at the company’s headquarters on Monday, Nov. 9, 2026, in Redmond, Washington.
Lindsey Wasson/AP
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Lindsey Wasson/AP
A widespread outage hit Microsoft platforms, including Outlook, on Thursday, with many users experiencing problems using their email accounts and other errors across the tech giant’s suite of applications.
Nearly 130,000 users of the Downdetector outage tracker reported problems accessing Outlook just after 1 p.m. ET. New reports have since fallen from that peak, but many said they couldn’t send or receive emails or were having trouble loading their inboxes.
Thousands of people also reported problems with Teams, Microsoft’s workplace messaging app, as well as its AI assistant Copilot and broader Microsoft 365 services.
Microsoft said it was investigating outages, particularly related to its email and Teams apps.
In updates posted on social media, Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said it was aware that users were “experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.”
Microsoft explained that a portion of its infrastructure was “experiencing high load,” which it said was “likely contributing to the connectivity errors.” The company determined that several servers were “unexpectedly unavailable” due to an issue that caused them to fail during “automated health checks.”
It was not immediately clear what exactly caused that failure. But Microsoft later said it was testing a fix and implementing an alternative method for these checks to bring affected servers back online.
“We are aggressively pursuing all avenues to reduce the impact,” wrote the Microsoft 365 Status account on X.
Earlier in the day, the company said it had “successfully restored” issues related to Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues.
