Microsoft Outlook and Teams outage disrupts services in 74 countries

Microsoft Outlook and Teams experienced a global outage Thursday, disrupting services for millions of users across 74 countries and territories. Microsoft said it was working aggressively to restore connectivity after attributing the issue to elevated load on its infrastructure. The disruption affected Microsoft 365 products including Outlook, Teams, and the AI assistant Copilot, with Downdetector reporting roughly 130,000 user complaints in the US shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time. Microsoft paused deployments, moved traffic off affected servers, and restarted systems, but reported only limited recovery by evening. Outage reports declined to about 37,000 by 6 pm Eastern Time, though thousands still faced issues with Teams and Copilot. Microsoft initially investigated reports in the Americas before confirming the problem could affect users in any region.