Outlook and Teams down as widespread Microsoft outage hits multiple services - Toronto Star

Microsoft Outlook, Teams, 365, OneDrive and Copilot were among the programs potentially affected, according to Downdetector, a website that tracks digital outages.

Services that are potentially down include Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR, the company said on its website.

A widespread outage has taken multiple Microsoft products offline.

Services that are potentially down include Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR, the company said on its website.

“We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” the tech conglomerate posted from its Microsoft 365 Status account on X shortly before 1 p.m.

Microsoft later confirmed the issue could affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity “for users in any region.” 

Then, just before 2:15, the company said it had “paused all deployments,” moved “additional traffic off the affected infrastructure,” and that they were restarting affected servers to return them to service.

About 15 minutes later, Microsoft said it had identified the cause of the disruption.

“We determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure,” the company wrote on social media.

Microsoft Outlook, Teams, 365, OneDrive and Copilot were among the programs showing high volumes of users reporting outages, according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced website displaying data about digital outages.

About 130,000 users reported problems with Outlook at the peak of the outage, which was at about 1:15 p.m.

Joshua Smith is a staff reporter with the Toronto Star. He can be reached at joshuasmith@thestar.ca.