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Major Microsoft services, including Outlook, Teams, and Microsoft 365, experienced widespread outages affecting thousands of U.S. users on Thursday.
The disruption also extended to integration connectors used by AI providers OpenAI and Anthropic.
Almost 130,000 users reported problems accessing Outlook just after 1 p.m. ET on outage tracker Downdetector, a website that tracks outages by aggregating status reports from several sources.
Reports have since fallen some but many users said they still couldn't send and receive emails or had trouble loading their inboxes altogether.
Downdetector 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 said that its team paused all deployments and was routing additional traffic away from the affected infrastructure while restarting impacted servers to bring them back into service.
“We're actively restarting and validating the affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting a small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery,” the company wrote in its latest update on X.
