Major Microsoft Outlook Outage Leaves People With Email Jobs Unable to Email

It’s not just you. Microsoft’s 365 business and enterprise services suffered a major outage on Thursday, preventing users of its popular cloud suite from accessing their accounts.

Around 10:40 am ET on Thursday morning, Microsoft posted on its 365 status page on X that it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues when accessing or using Microsoft Teams functionality in North America.” By just before 1pm ET, it said it was aware of “issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.”

Microsoft later said that its network was also “experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” but that the issue was related to servers going offline, not due to increased traffic.

Around an hour later, Microsoft said it had “begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load” and was “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”

“We’ve paused all deployments. We’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service,” Microsoft wrote.

In an update on its status page, Microsoft said impacted services may include Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, and Microsoft Defender XDR.

“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson tells WIRED in a statement. “We appreciate our customer’s patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.”

Outage reports on the service uptime tracking website Downdetector began falling around 1:15 pm ET after a large spike in users reporting issues with Outlook and other Microsoft 365 products around noon.

It is currently unclear when the outage may be over or what its cause may be. In a status update on X posted just before 3 pm ET, Microsoft said “a problem” was “causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable” but that it’s attempting to reboot its systems to hopefully bring them back online.

Outages in cloud services occur frequently, and their causes can vary. Configuration errors, resolution issues with the Domain Name System, and cyberattacks can all cause connection errors. There is currently no indication that a cyberattack caused the current Microsoft outage.

While major Microsoft outages are relatively rare, they are far from unprecedented. In July 2024, a corrupted update from the security firm Crowdstrike knocked out Microsoft Azure services for hours, causing untold millions of dollars in lost revenue due to companies’ inability to function as normal.

Updated 11/12/2026 at 3:05 pm ET: Added comment from Microsoft.

Additional reporting by Matt Burgess.