Microsoft Outlook global outage disrupts email for nearly 130,000 users

Microsoft Outlook experienced a major global outage on Thursday, leaving nearly 130,000 users unable to access their email services, according to Downdetector. Microsoft confirmed the disruption could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity across all regions, citing elevated load on infrastructure in multiple areas as the likely cause. The company paused deployments, redirected traffic, and began restarting servers to restore services. Thousands of users also reported issues with Microsoft Teams, though Microsoft said it had successfully restored North American Teams problems earlier that day. Outage reports declined to around 60,000 by 3 pm Eastern Time.