Microsoft Outlook outage hits 74 countries, disrupting Teams and Copilot

Microsoft Outlook experienced a major global outage on Thursday, affecting tens of thousands of users across 74 countries and territories, with Microsoft attributing the disruption to "elevated load" on its infrastructure. The outage, which lasted much of the US workday, also impacted other Microsoft products including Teams and the AI assistant Copilot. Downdetector reported around 130,000 US users flagged issues with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time, with reports declining to about 37,000 by 6 pm. Microsoft said it was "aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," pausing deployments and restarting affected servers. By late afternoon, the company observed "limited recovery" as it rerouted traffic, noting users may experience gradual restoration as clients reconnect.