Reports of trouble accessing Outlook began arriving from around the world just before 1 p.m. ET, affecting both the web service and its apps. Microsoft said a portion of its infrastructure was seeing “elevated load across multiple regions,” likely contributing to connection errors.¹

The disruption widened beyond email. Microsoft later said the outage affected “any region,” and reported that a large number of servers had become unexpectedly unavailable, without explaining why. Users also reported problems with Teams, while Microsoft listed Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, Defender XDR, OneDrive and Office for the web among the affected services.² Microsoft said it was redistributing connection traffic across its global infrastructure to balance the load.²

By 3:30 p.m. ET, the company said it had not found recent changes that matched the start of the incident. Its investigation pointed instead to a component on affected servers that processes health checks. Microsoft was deploying a targeted change to bypass that component on some servers, while also working to stop more servers from being taken out of service and examining unusually high processor use.¹

The recovery remained uncertain: Microsoft had not said how long restoration would take or whether the change would resolve all reported problems. The company’s own status pages were also difficult to load, and its admin center was unreachable at the time of one report.¹²