A major technical outage at Microsoft has disrupted access to several widely used online services, affecting businesses and individual users.
The disruption affected key platforms, including Outlook email, Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications, leaving thousands of users unable to access their accounts.
Outage-tracking website Down Detector recorded thousands of reports from users experiencing difficulties, with Outlook receiving a particularly high number of complaints.
Microsoft acknowledged the technical problems, saying its teams were working to restore affected services and that recovery efforts were showing signs of progress.
According to the company, several servers unexpectedly went offline, placing additional pressure on the remaining infrastructure and disrupting access to email accounts.
Microsoft also indicated that automated systems designed to monitor server performance may have contributed to the disruption.
Engineers have been working to restart affected servers, redirect network traffic and implement technical fixes to restore normal operations.
The company said an initial intervention had successfully brought some servers back online, with the solution being rolled out across its wider infrastructure.
Microsoft initially said it was investigating outage reports "in the Americas," but later confirmed that the issue apparently affected "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.
"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 added.
"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 with Teams and Copilot, according to Downdetector.