Microsoft outage hits tens of thousands of users

What the report says

Microsoft experienced a widespread service outage on Thursday that left tens of thousands of users reporting problems with Outlook, Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 tools, according to Al Jazeera’s report based on company statements and outage tracking data. The disruption affected email access, message delivery and the ability to open inboxes for some users.

Reports of Outlook problems surged to about 130,000 on Downdetector shortly after 1pm Eastern Time, then eased to roughly 77,000 by just before 3pm, the article said. Microsoft said the outage could affect users in any region, indicating the issue was not confined to one market.

In comments posted on X, Microsoft said servers were unavailable and were failing automated health checks. The company said it was testing a configuration change to spread traffic across its infrastructure and restarting affected services. It said it was working to safely restore access, but did not give a timeline for full recovery.

The incident matters because Outlook and Teams are core tools for workplace communication, and even a temporary disruption can affect business operations across many organizations. More broadly, outages at major cloud and software providers can have wide spillover effects when a large number of customers depend on the same systems.