Outlook down, problems for Microsoft services around the world

Problems have occurred in various parts of the world with Microsoft services, including the Outlook email system. The company confirms this on its social profiles, after many reports of disservices from users. “As we work to mitigate the impact, we can confirm that the issue may impact Microsoft 365 services connectivity for users in any geographic region,” the message reads. The company then underlined that it had "suspended deployments" and "restarted the affected servers to restore their functionality".

Outlook resumes service with some slowdowns

For about an hour, the email service experienced operational problems, with numerous users reporting difficulties in accessing their inbox and sending or receiving emails. After the reports, the situation seems to be returning to normal. Around 7.30pm Italian time, over 120 thousand users had reported disruptions, with the inability to send and receive emails or severe delays. Thousands of reports also affected Teams, the artificial intelligence assistant Copilot and other Microsoft 365 services.

Disservices with Microsoft

The Redmond group explained that some users "are experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes via multiple connection methods in the Americas." Some of the infrastructure, he added, is "experiencing high load," which "likely contributes to connectivity errors," and traffic will be redistributed to balance this. Microsoft previously said it had resolved the Teams issues in North America, although some users continued to report connection difficulties.

Problems also with OpenAI

The outage today also affected the artificial intelligence servers of OpenAI and Anthropic. Specifically, OpenAI announced that it is working to investigate a problem with Microsoft connectors, due to which new connections may be interrupted. While Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.