Users of Microsoft 365 services, including email client Microsoft Outlook, reported outages in the thousands Thursday as Microsoft confirmed a “service degradation.”
Outage reports on monitoring website Downdetector for Microsoft 365 as a whole began rising after 12:21 p.m. EST, peaking at more than 48,000 reports at around 1:15 p.m. For Microsoft Outlook specifically, reports began rising at around the same time, peaking at more than 130,000 outage reports at around 1:15 p.m.
The Microsoft 365 Status account on social media said just before 1 p.m. that they were looking into “users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.” Exchange Online is the email backend for Microsoft Outlook.
People were interested in these podcasts
The account said in an update after 1:30 p.m. that “a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.”
On a dedicated Microsoft status website, the software giant said just before 2 p.m. that Microsoft 365 was experiencing “service degradation,” meaning that users may not be able to connect.
“As a precaution, we’ve paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We’ve also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load,” Microsoft said on the status website.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.