Microsoft’s widespread outage left users across the United States unable to access their Outlook email, leaving office workers either frustrated or, in some cases, quietly relieved.
“We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas,” the company posted on X Thursday afternoon.
Although reports of Outlook disruptions declined from a peak of more than 130,000 earlier in the afternoon, approximately 31,000 users were still reporting issues as of 8:00 p.m. ET, according to Downdetector. The outage appears to have commenced shortly after noon.
The disruption persisted throughout much of the workday across the United States, with the company later stating that it is “aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact.”
Earlier in the day, Microsoft indicated in an update that the problems originated from “failed health checks” potentially stemming from “a specific component on the affected servers that’s responsible for processing them.” The company subsequently announced that it was restarting those servers, as they “have become unresponsive.”
At 8:00 p.m., Microsoft confirmed that several Microsoft 365 services interacting with Exchange Online and email infrastructure had been affected, including Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Microsoft 365, and Copilot AI.
Meanwhile, many professionals within Corporate America appeared largely unbothered by the situation. “no outlook, no teams…. how about we all just go home,” one X user posted that day.
