Microsoft 365 outage: Outlook and Teams down worldwide now

Microsoft has suffered a large-scale outage, and users around the world cannot sign in to Outlook email. Shortly after 7 p.m. Central European Time, Downdetector recorded more than 130 thousand reports of problems with Outlook.

What is known about the outage

It is not a total blackout: some users can work as usual, and availability depends on the specific service and customer. According to The Verge, complaints surged shortly before 7 p.m. Mailboxes would not open, and both the web version of Outlook and the apps were affected.

Microsoft, as reported by the AP news agency, explained that some servers failed automatic checks and became unavailable, overloading the rest of the infrastructure. The company is testing a fix and has not said when full service will be restored. Microsoft first reported problems with Exchange Online mailboxes in the U.S. region, and later admitted that the outage could affect connections to Microsoft 365 in any region. Complaints also came from Brazil.

Besides email, people complained about other tools: the AP counted thousands of reports of problems with Teams, the Copilot assistant and other Microsoft 365 services. The situation with Teams kept changing: the company said an earlier problem in North America had been fixed, but some users continued to report connection trouble.

How this affects Czechia

Microsoft services are used by companies, government offices and schools, so the outage may also be felt by people who sign in to work or school email under their organization's own domain: their mailboxes may run on the American giant's infrastructure. One Prague high school confirmed problems accessing school email. For companies, an outage like this means difficulties communicating with customers and colleagues. While it was already evening in Czechia, the problems in America began during the working day.

Switching from the app to a browser does not help, according to Microsoft: the problems affect several ways of connecting to Exchange Online mailboxes. Engineers are redistributing traffic, diverting requests away from the affected infrastructure and restarting servers. The final cause has not yet been established.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz