NEW YORK (WOKI / WVLT) — Thousands of users around the globe experienced widespread disruptions across Microsoft’s suite of workplace tools Thursday afternoon, with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 bearing the brunt of the outage.
According to the outage-tracking website https://downdetector.com/, user reports began spiking around 1:10 p.m. ET, quickly climbing to more than 130,000 complaints specifically tied to Outlook. Many users reported being locked out of their inboxes or unable to send and receive messages across desktop, web, and mobile platforms.
The disruption extended well beyond email. Downdetector logged more than 48,000 additional user reports involving the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Users also flagged connectivity issues with Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot. Because many workplace tools rely on Microsoft’s infrastructure, the outage also caused temporary integration failures for third-party AI connectors used by OpenAI and Anthropic.
In an update posted to its official status channel, Microsoft confirmed it was investigating issues preventing users from accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods. By 1:48 p.m. ET, the tech giant stated it had begun redistributing connection traffic across its broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load.
Microsoft later noted that a number of servers had unexpectedly gone offline and initiated server restarts to gradually restore capacity. While user reports on Downdetector steadily declined throughout the late afternoon and evening as services began recovering, some users continued to experience intermittent delays as systems reconnected.
