Microsoft Outlook, Office and 365 outages reported by thousands of users

A Microsoft 365 outage is impacting user experience on Thursday — just one day after the company seemingly resolved another outage.

According to Downdetector, a site that tracks outages, more than 15,000 people reported that Microsoft 365 was not working as of 4 p.m. ET on Thursday. Microsoft 365 is a cloud-based productivity suite that includes apps such as Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Teams, as well as business-focused services like Exchange and OneDrive.

So far, 60% of reports on Downdetector included issues with Exchange, 33% reported problems with the Microsoft 365 admin center and 7% reported an issue with the server.

At about 2:30 p.m., following initial reports of outages, Microsoft responded on X, writing, “We’re investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview.” About 45 minutes later, they wrote, “We’ve identified a portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected. We’re working to restore the infrastructure to a healthy state to achieve recovery.”

Later, around 4 p.m., Microsoft provided an update. “We’re continuing to review what actions are required to restore the affected infrastructure to a healthy state and rebalance the service traffic to achieve recovery,” they posted on X. As of 5 p.m., service had not been restored.

On X, users have expressed issues like not receiving external emails, as well as being unable to sign in.

Yahoo reached out to Microsoft for comment and has not heard back at this time.

This is not the first time this week that Microsoft faced an outage. On Wednesday, the company said in a post on X that an outage was impacting Microsoft 365. Later in the day, the company wrote on X, “Our investigation indicates a possible third-party networking issue may be affecting access to Microsoft 365 services, including Teams and Outlook for some users.”

At 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, however, Microsoft said the issue was resolved.