The disruption began around 11:40 a.m. Pacific Time, with Outlook bearing the brunt of the impact. At the height of the incident, close to 15,000 users reported problems on Down Detector. Other Microsoft platforms - including Teams, Microsoft 365, and the admin center - were also affected, halting normal business operations across much of North America.
Microsoft later attributed the outage to congestion within its North American infrastructure, which was overwhelmed by traffic it failed to manage properly. An initial attempt to correct the issue backfired. Adjustments to traffic routing ended up worsening the imbalance, effectively expanding the scope of the outage rather than resolving it.
By the evening, Microsoft stated that its systems had returned to a stable condition and that service restoration was underway. However, user feedback told a different story. Many people continued to report problems accessing email and administrative tools hours after Microsoft’s announcement. One user on X described the situation bluntly, saying their organization was “still completely offline.”
The timing may have softened the visible impact. As offices on the U.S. East Coast closed for the day, complaint volumes naturally declined, making it difficult to determine whether services had fully recovered or if users had simply stopped trying.
The incident marked Microsoft’s second extended service disruption in the same week, following another multi-hour outage earlier in the week.
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