It’s not fair You. Microsoft’s 365 Business Services suffered a major outage on Thursday, preventing users of its popular cloud suite from accessing their accounts.
Around 10:40 a.m. ET Thursday morning, Microsoft posted on its X 365 status page that it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing or using features in Microsoft Teams in North America.” Just before 1 p.m. ET, it said it was aware of “issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes via multiple sign-in methods in the Americas.”
Microsoft later said its network was also “experiencing high load in several regions, which is likely contributing to connectivity errors,” but that the problem was related to servers going offline, not increased traffic.
About an hour later, Microsoft said it had “begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader global infrastructure to help balance the load” and was “aggressively pursuing all avenues to reduce the impact.”
“We have paused all deployments. We are removing additional traffic from affected infrastructure and restarting affected servers to return them to service,” Microsoft wrote.
In an update on its status page, Microsoft said affected services could include Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, and Microsoft Defender XDR.
“We are aware of and are investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson told WIRED in a statement. “We appreciate our customers’ patience as we work to restore services as quickly as possible.”
Outage reports on service uptime tracking website Downdetector began to drop around 1:15 p.m. ET after a sharp increase in users reporting issues with Outlook and other Microsoft 365 products around noon.
It is not yet known when the outage will end or what the cause will be. In a status update for
Cloud service outages occur frequently and their causes can vary. Configuration errors, resolution issues with the domain name system, and cyberattacks can all cause connection errors. There is currently no indication that a cyberattack caused Microsoft’s current outage.
While major Microsoft outages are relatively rare, they are far from unprecedented. In July 2024, a corrupt update from security firm Crowdstrike took down Microsoft Azure services for hours, resulting in an untold loss of millions of dollars in revenue due to the inability of businesses to operate normally.
Updated 11/12/2026 3:05 PM ET: Added comment from Microsoft.
Additional reporting by Matt Burgess.
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