Microsoft outage hits Outlook. AWS and Google users also report issues

Microsoft suffered a widespread outage on Thursday that affected thousands of users across all regions, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.

The outage began shortly before 1 p.m. and impacted Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams services. Amazon Web Services and Google users have also reported outages on the site.

“We are aware of and are investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily with Exchange Online,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a statement to CNBC. “We appreciate our customers’ patience as we work to restore services as quickly as possible.”

Microsoft shared from its Microsoft 365 Status account on the X social media platform.

As of 4 p.m., Microsoft said it had “validated an alternative service health check method” that brought some affected servers back online.

“We are now implementing this change more broadly,” Microsoft wrote. “We are also preparing automated recovery systems to continuously detect and restart unresponsive servers, to maintain service stability as this change progresses.”

Microsoft initially wrote that some “high load in multiple regions” infrastructure was responsible for the connectivity issues.

The company later determined that the high load was caused by “a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, putting a strain on the remaining infrastructure.”

“We have taken steps to prevent additional servers from being affected while we work to return affected servers to service,” Microsoft wrote.