Microsoft investigating outage affecting Microsoft 365, Outlook and other services

Thousands of Microsoft customers are reporting difficulty accessing the technology company's suite of Microsoft 365 services, including email platform Outlook, Teams and other tools. 

Users started reporting problems accessing Microsoft applications on Thursday afternoon, according to Downdetector, a site tracking website outages. Complaints spiked at around 3 p.m. EST, when 16,000 people said they were having trouble accessing Microsoft 365. 

Microsoft acknowledged the problem, stating on its website that "users may be seeing degraded service functionality or be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services." The company said 

At 4:14 p.m. EST, Microsoft said in a statement on X that it had "restored the affected infrastructure to a healthy state."

In a later post, however, the company said it was still "rebalancing traffic across all affected infrastructure to ensure the environment enters into a balanced state."

As of late Thursday afternoon, some social media users were still complaining that they were unable to access Microsoft 365 tools. "We cannot even email. This is not fixed," one person said on X.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what caused the service outage. 

In 2024, a botched update of CrowdStrike antivirus software caused global outages for Microsoft 365 users. The disruptions led to thousands of flight delays and cancellations, while hospitals, banks and other businesses around the world were also affected.