Microsoft Outlook outage affects over 120,000 users in the Americas

A widespread outage impacted Microsoft platforms on Thursday, leaving many users unable to access email and other core applications.

By 1:30 p.m. ET, more than 120,000 users on the Downdetector tracker reported problems accessing Outlook. Many of these users could not send or receive emails, while others experienced significant delays.

Thousands of additional users reported issues with Microsoft Teams, the company's AI assistant Copilot, and broader Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Washington, stated in social media updates that it was aware of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.

The company later identified that a portion of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load, which it said was likely contributing to the connectivity errors. Microsoft announced it would begin redistributing traffic to help balance the system load.

Earlier in the day, Microsoft said it had successfully restored problems related to Microsoft Teams in North America, although some users continued to report connectivity issues at the time of the latest update.