Outlook down as widespread outage hits Microsoft services and OpenAI connectors

Reports surge across services

Outage tracker Downdetector recorded almost 130,000 reports of Outlook problems shortly after 1 p.m. ET. It also registered more than 38,000 reports involving Microsoft 365 and roughly 4,500 concerning Teams.

Microsoft works to restore servers

Microsoft said it paused deployments, redirected additional traffic away from affected infrastructure and restarted impacted servers. The company said it was pursuing ways to limit the disruption. Microsoft attributed the elevated load to a number of unexpectedly unavailable servers, rather than increased traffic. It said the remaining infrastructure was under strain as a result.

The company said its investigation pointed to a possible problem with a component that processes server health checks. Microsoft reported taking steps to keep more servers from being affected while it worked to restore service.

Teams and OpenAI updates

Earlier in the day, Microsoft said a Teams disruption affecting users in North America had been fixed and was fully resolved. It later said the problem could also affect Microsoft 365 connectivity in other regions.

OpenAI said it was investigating an issue with Microsoft connectors. The problem could cause new connections to break and tools not to work as expected.