Outlook outage hits Microsoft 365 users in Canada, U.S.

Tens of thousands of Microsoft users in Canada and the United States reported problems with Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services on Thursday afternoon, and the company said a portion of its infrastructure was under elevated load across multiple regions.

Outage tracker Downdetector logged nearly 140,000 reports of problems with Outlook as of 1:30 p.m. ET (11:30 a.m. MT), CTV News reported. Users also reported trouble with Copilot and Microsoft 365, the subscription suite that includes Word, Excel, Teams and OneDrive.

Microsoft said on its Microsoft 365 Status account on X that it had “determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.” The company said the issue may affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region and pointed administrators to incident EX1550543 in the Microsoft 365 admin center for updates.

Microsoft first described the problem as users being unable to reach their Exchange Online mailboxes, the service behind work and school Outlook accounts, through multiple connection methods in the Americas, before widening the warning to any region, TechCrunch reported. A status page tracking the incident logged it at 17:46 UTC, which is 12:46 p.m. ET and 10:46 a.m. MT, according to Windows Forum.

Microsoft later said it was redistributing connection traffic across its broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load, according to TechCrunch.

As of 2:20 p.m. ET (12:20 p.m. MT), Microsoft had not said how many customers were affected, what caused the load or when service would be fully restored. Its public service status page for consumer products, which covers personal Outlook.com accounts, still listed Outlook.com as operational at that time. Downdetector counts are user-submitted reports, not a measure of the number of people actually locked out, and they can rise quickly when a widely used service falters.

Outlook is the main work email system for many Canadian employers, universities, hospitals and government offices, so a disruption during business hours can interrupt scheduling, messaging and file sharing at once.

Some users who could not connect turned to social media to vent or joke. One wrote that the company should “take your time” because “the peace and quiet is nice.”

Users who are affected can check status.cloud.microsoft and Microsoft’s status account on X. Administrators can follow incident EX1550543 under Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin center, which is where the company said it would publish further details. Because Microsoft said the problem affects multiple connection methods, switching from the desktop app to Outlook on the web or the mobile app may not get users back in. There is no need to reset passwords because of the outage.

The disruption comes the same week Canadian businesses have been dealing with turbulence in technology stocks. See our coverage of the TSX open as Nvidia turmoil weighs on tech, and our regular Canada Tech and AI Watch.

This is a developing story and will be updated as Microsoft provides more information.

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