Widespread Microsoft outage takes down Outlook and other 365 services

Microsoft suffered a widespread outage on Thursday that impacted thousands of users across regions, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

The outage began shortly before 1 p.m. and impacted Microsoft 365 services, Outlook and Teams. Amazon Web Services and Google users also reported outages on the site.

"We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a statement to CNBC. "We appreciate our customers' patience while we work to restore services as soon as possible."

Microsoft shared from its Microsoft 365 Status account on X.

"AWS services have been operating normally, however an unrelated disruption elsewhere on the internet is prompting some inaccurate news reports," Amazon wrote in post to social media platform X, referring users to the company's health dashboard.

At 4 p.m., Microsoft said it had "validated an alternative service health check method" that brought some affected servers back online.

"We're now applying this change more broadly," Microsoft wrote. "We're also preparing automated recovery systems to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to maintain service stability while this change progresses."

Microsoft initially wrote that some infrastructure "elevated load across multiple regions" was responsible for the connectivity problems.

The company later determined that the elevated load was caused by a "number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable; straining the remaining infrastructure" and that some servers were failing automated health checks.