If your inbox stopped loading and Teams started acting up last night, it wasn’t your Wi-Fi. A global Microsoft outage has left Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services unavailable or unstable for a large number of users. The disruption began on Thursday afternoon US time, late Thursday night in India, and has now lasted more than eight hours.
Users in the US, the UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia are among those reporting problems. On Downdetector, Outlook reports peaked at nearly 140,000 worldwide around 18:00 GMT, or 11:30 pm IST. Even Microsoft’s own status page went offline for a while.
Microsoft’s status page listed Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR as affected. Exchange Online is the back-end service behind Outlook email, which is why so many people couldn’t log in or open their mailboxes. Some users also couldn’t open certain files or see calendar details.
Microsoft later narrowed the list to features that depend on Exchange Online and email. Messaging and online meetings were largely working, and Azure appeared to be running normally. The outage is limited to Microsoft 365 enterprise products, so consumer services aren’t affected.
Recovery is under way, but slowly. Microsoft first flagged the problem at 12:54 pm ET, saying Exchange Online mailboxes in the Americas were affected. Within minutes, it confirmed that users in any region could lose connection.
The company says its infrastructure came under elevated load in several regions, but not because of a rise in traffic. A large number of servers went offline without warning, and their workload fell onto the remaining systems. Microsoft hasn’t found a root cause yet and says no recent change appears to be linked. It suggests the failed health checks may trace back to a component that processes server health.
Microsoft has validated an alternative health check method that let some servers return to service, and it is rerouting traffic where it can. It has also warned that restored servers could become unresponsive again once traffic hits them, so it has limited the kinds of traffic reaching them in some locations.
In its latest update on X, Microsoft said it was “seeing positive results” from restarting affected systems. It hasn’t given a timeline for full restoration.
While IT teams scrambled, the rest of the internet was mostly celebrating. With Outlook and Teams down at the end of the week, plenty of users on X decided the weekend had come early.
User The_bigsm0ke wrote, “Microsoft is down, Don’t bother opening your laptop’s beloved, the weekend is here.” WhateverVishal was even more pleased: “Microsoft down on a Friday. There is GOD.”
Uncanny_piscean went further and asked for a global holiday, pointing out that “for once the ‘technical issue’ is someone else’s problem.” SandyVanguard_ had different concerns, joking that their company was already on Diwali holidays and that Microsoft “should have waited until after the holidays to go down.”
Not everyone joined in. Omgsidewalks reminded everyone that the unread emails and Teams messages will still be there once services return: “You’re not getting a day off. You’re just borrowing stress from tomorrow.”