A sign on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, US, Oct. 26, 2026.
David Ryder | Reuters
Microsoft suffered a widespread outage on Thursday that impacted thousands of users across regions, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.
The outage began shortly before 1 p.m. and affected services Microsoft 365 services, Outlook. Amazon Web Services and Google users also reported outages on the site.
“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a statement to CNBC. “We appreciate our customers’ patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible.”
Microsoft provided updates on the situation from its Microsoft 365 Status account on social media platform X.
The company said at 4 p.m. that it “validated an alternative service health check method” that brought some impacted servers back online.
“We’re now applying this change more broadly,” Microsoft wrote. “We’re also preparing automated recovery systems to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to maintain service stability while this change progresses.”
Microsoft initially wrote that some infrastructure “elevated load across multiple regions” was responsible for the connectivity problems across its services.
The company later determined that the elevated load was caused by a “number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”
“We’ve taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service,” Microsoft wrote.
