Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts Outlook & Teams for Thousands Across North America

REDMOND, Washington — Thousands of users across North America experienced widespread disruptions to Microsoft cloud services on Thursday, affecting core enterprise platforms including Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams.

According to outage monitoring platform DownDetector, more than 15,000 users reported issues with Microsoft 365 around 3:00 PM Eastern Time. At the same time, approximately 12,000 users were unable to access Outlook email services, while Microsoft Teams experienced partial downtime impacting workplace communication.

Microsoft Confirms Cloud Infrastructure Issue

Microsoft acknowledged the disruption through its official support channels, stating that the outage was linked to service infrastructure failures in North America.

The company confirmed that certain systems were not processing traffic correctly, prompting engineers to initiate emergency recovery and traffic redistribution measures.

Recovery and Traffic Rebalancing in Progress

Nearly two hours after the outage began, Microsoft reported that the affected infrastructure had been restored to a healthy state. However, the company continued to rebalance traffic across alternate cloud infrastructure to ensure full platform stability.

By early evening, outage reports dropped significantly, signaling gradual recovery across Microsoft’s SaaS ecosystem.

Second Microsoft Service Disruption in Two Days

This outage followed a separate Microsoft service interruption on January 21, which was attributed to a third-party networking provider failure. That incident lasted just over an hour but raised concerns over cloud reliability and enterprise SaaS resilience.

Ongoing Monitoring

Microsoft stated that engineering teams are continuing to monitor system performance and will take additional actions if necessary to prevent further disruptions.

This story will be updated as more information becomes available.