Global outage hits Microsoft's Outlook, 365 services

Microsoft Outlook suffered a major outage Friday (NZ time), with tens of thousands of users struggling to access their email as the company said it was working "aggressively" to reduce the impact.

Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas," but later said it had "confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region."

Microsoft 365 is the company's cloud-based subscription service that includes popular applications such as Outlook and Teams.

In a statement on its website Microsoft said Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365 and Defender XDR may also be impacted.

According to outage tracker Downdetector, nearly 130,000 users reported issues with Outlook shortly after 1 pm Eastern Time (1800 GMT).

Reports of outages have since declined, with about 60,000 users reporting experiencing issues with Outlook as of 3 pm Eastern Time (2000 GMT).

"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company wrote on X.

"We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," it said.

"We've paused all deployments, we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we're restarting affected servers to return them to service."

Thousands of users also reported issues accessing Microsoft Teams, according to Downdetector.

- AFP with additional reporting by RNZ