Microsoft 365 and Outlook outage leaves users worldwide reporting problems

The outage mainly affected Exchange Online, the back end of work and school email accounts. Users reported problems sending and receiving messages, loading mailboxes, accessing calendars and signing in to Microsoft 365 services. Problems were also reported in Microsoft Teams and the Copilot assistant.

Scale of the problem

According to Downdetector, a service that monitors IT outages, the first reports appeared at around 18:00–18:30 Polish time. Sources give slightly different start times and peak figures. TVN24 reports complaints from 74 countries and territories, while Antyweb gives a peak of close to 140,000 reports. The number of reports later fell below 100,000, but Microsoft has not said when services will be fully restored.

What Microsoft says

Microsoft confirmed the outage on its Microsoft 365 Status account on X and gave it the incident number EX1550543. The first message referred to the Americas. In a later post, the company said the problem could affect users in any region, including Poland. According to Microsoft, part of its infrastructure in several regions is overloaded, and engineers are restarting and repairing affected components. The company is also checking whether an unexpected increase in a particular type of traffic caused the overload.

Administrators looking for details are directed to the Microsoft 365 admin centre. According to internet users quoted by Antyweb, that site was also working poorly.

What this means for you

Sources do not give separate figures for the United Kingdom. Microsoft says the outage may affect users in all regions, so people in the UK who use Microsoft 365 for work or study may see the same problems with email and Teams. Antyweb suggests holding off on important projects while the outage continues. It is also worth watching the Microsoft 365 status page, as the company has not yet given a time for restoring services.