Microsoft's Outlook outage disrupts North American users

Microsoft's Outlook email service experienced a major outage on Thursday, disrupting users across North America and potentially other regions, with over 129,000 error reports logged by 1:09 p.m. ET. Microsoft confirmed the issue at 12:54 p.m. ET, citing problems accessing Exchange Online mailboxes. The outage also affected Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft 365 suite, cloud storage, Copilot 365 AI, and SharePoint Online, impacting both individual and enterprise accounts. By 1:35 p.m. ET, Microsoft attributed the disruption to elevated infrastructure load across multiple regions and began redistributing connection traffic to balance it. The company is investigating an unexpected increase in specific service traffic as a potential cause.