Outlook Outage: Is Outlook Down? Microsoft 365 and Teams Hit Thousands of U.S. Users on Thursday
Email and meetings stumbled across the country Thursday afternoon as Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams went down for thousands of users - the outage became the day's No. 1 search in the United States, at more than two million searches.
AUSTIN - If your work email stopped on Thursday afternoon, you were in very large company. Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams were down for thousands of users in the United States on Thursday, Reuters reported, and 'outlook outage' became the No. 1 search in the country, at more than two million searches on the day's trending listings read by this desk.
The scale showed up in the outage trackers first. More than 130,000 reports for Outlook had been filed on Downdetector by 1:27 p.m. Eastern, with more than 46,000 for Microsoft 365 and about 3,000 for Teams, Reuters reported. CNBC's account put the start of the outage shortly before 1 p.m. Eastern, affecting Outlook, Teams and the wider Microsoft 365 service that offices, schools and government agencies run on.
Microsoft said an earlier disruption to Teams had been resolved, and later said Microsoft 365 connectivity problems could affect other regions as well, according to Reuters. CNBC reported the company attributed the failure to elevated load and servers that were unexpectedly unavailable, and that it was restarting servers in response. Neither report read this cycle carried a time by which Microsoft promised full restoration, and this story claims none.
For Austin, the outage landed in the middle of a workday in a city whose tech, university and government offices lean on the same Microsoft stack as the rest of the country. The honest status at filing time is the one the sources support: a major Thursday-afternoon outage, a cause named by the company, a restart effort under way - and a search chart that says exactly how many people went looking for an explanation.
