Thousands of Microsoft users in the Americas experienced difficulties connecting to Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services in the afternoon hours of Thursday, which led to an investigation conducted by the company.
According to the official status update posted by Microsoft 365 on its account on X, the company has been informed about the issues of “users experiencing difficulty accessing Exchange Online mailboxes using multiple connection options in the Americas.” No additional information was provided by the company except for the ongoing investigation.
The website tracking service interruptions, DownDetector, has registered an enormous spike in the number of complaints starting at noon ET. In total, more than 22,000 error reports have been reported by 12:55 p.m. ET, with the number exceeding 120,000 by early afternoon, while the affected locations included Chicago, Seattle, and New York.
In a subsequent post, Microsoft mentioned that “our automated recovery features have kicked in and started restoring service,” while telemetry suggested that they were “effectively reducing impact.” Microsoft mentioned that it is doing everything to mitigate impact and stated that the problem “may impact Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users across any region.”
The event comes after a previous outage affecting Microsoft Teams service in North America, which, according to Microsoft, had been resolved at about noon.
The company did not provide any comments when asked for a statement. Microsoft has not revealed what the cause of the outage was or how many users were affected by it.
