Microsoft 365 hit by massive outage across the Americas
· Toronto Sun
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Microsoft confirmed that its email service was hit with a massive outage, affecting users in the Americas and potentially other regions Thursday afternoon.
In a post on X just before 1 p.m., the company said “We’re investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.”
In a follow-up tweet, Microsoft said its investigation found that “the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region.”
By 1:35 p.m., the company said a portion of its infrastructure “is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.”
Ten minutes later, another update noted it had “begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load.”
In a later update at 2:31 p.m., Microsoft said, “We determined the elevated load isn’t driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure.”
It said it was “working to safely return them to service.”
According to online outage tracker Downdetector , Microsoft 365 users in Canada first began reporting the issue just before 12:30 p.m., around the same time U.S. users also began experiencing problems.
The Microsoft Outlook outage peaked at 1:50 p.m, according to Downdetector, with over 13,000 reports in Canada.
Many more Outlook users were affected by the outage in the U.S. with just over 100,000 reporting the problem to Downdetector.
The outage tracker also noted that users of other Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Copilot, reported outages.
According to Dynamics Connect, a U.K.-based Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partner, Microsoft 365 has nearly 345 million paid subscribers and about 321 million active users worldwide.