Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 Services Suffer Widespread Outage on Thursday

Microsoft's Outlook email service and other Microsoft 365 products suffered a widespread outage on Thursday, leaving many users unable to send and receive email. By about 1:30 p.m. ET, more than 120,000 users had reported Outlook problems to the outage tracker Downdetector, and thousands also reported trouble with Teams and Copilot. Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load in the Americas and that it was redistributing traffic to balance it. Earlier, the company said Teams problems in North America had been restored, though some users still reported connectivity issues, and it did not immediately provide further details.

Left-leaning coverage, from NBC News, leads with the outage's reach, citing the 120,000-plus tracker reports and Microsoft's elevated-load explanation, and stresses that Microsoft offered no further information. Alternative sources, ZeroHedge and Variety, focus on Microsoft's status posts: ZeroHedge repeats the admin-center reference and says the problem could hit users in any region, while Variety describes a nationwide, North American scope. Right-leaning sources, the New York Post and Fox Business, report over 140,000 reports and emphasize that servers became unexpectedly unavailable, a cause Fox Business says was not traffic growth, and it lists affected services such as SharePoint and Defender; the Post says the cause of the server failures is unclear. Sides agree on the Americas Exchange problem and elevated load, but differ on the tracker count and on whether the cause is server loss or load alone.