Is Outlook down? Widespread outage hits Microsoft and OpenAI

Is Outlook down? Widespread outage hits Microsoft and OpenAI ‘We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,’ Microsoft said in a statement - Bookmark Become an Independent member to bookmark this article Already a member? Log in Major Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft 365, experienced widespread outages affecting thousands of U.S. users on Thursday, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com. The disruption also extended to integration connectors used by AI providers OpenAI and Anthropic. Downdetector, which tracks outages by aggregating status reports from several sources, recorded more than 97,000 incidents of users reporting issues with Outlook at 2:07 p.m. ET. The actual number of affected individuals may vary. The tracking platform also recorded more than 38,000 user reports concerning problems with Microsoft 365, alongside roughly 4,500 reports of users encountering difficulties accessing Teams. "We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact," Microsoft said in a statement. The company added that its team has paused all deployments, is routing additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure, and is restarting impacted servers to bring them back into service. Microsoft stated earlier in the day that it had fixed a Teams disruption affecting users in North America and that the issue was fully resolved. However, the business later noted that the problem could also impact Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in other regions. OpenAI said it was investigating an issue involving Microsoft connectors where new connections may break and tools do not function as expected. Anthropic said it had identified an issue with an upstream provider that was affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.