Microsoft Outlook outages reported nationwide

Microsoft Outlook is experiencing outages in multiple regions nationwide, causing trouble for users trying to access their emails.

In a release on Thursday afternoon, the company said it’s actively investigating the issue, which is also impacting other Microsoft software like Teams.

“We’ve determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” a spokesperson said.

Per Microsoft, the company is restarting and repairing impacted portions of the infrastructure to help fix these issues, as well as “reviewing an unexpected increase” in specific service traffic to figure out whether it’s contributing to the problem.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact,” the company announced shortly after 2 p.m. “We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service.”

DISRUPTIONS IN CENTRAL FLORIDA

The outage disrupted services including email, Teams and Copilot, affecting organizations across Central Florida, including Orange County Public Schools, the University of Central Florida and News 6.

Danny Jenkins, CEO and co-founder of Orlando-based cybersecurity company ThreatLocker, said Microsoft was working to get ahead of potential cyber threats when the disruption occurred.

“Their monitoring system was doing health checks on their servers, which took some servers offline,” Jenkins said. He said that increased demand on backup servers then overloaded them, affecting additional systems.

Jenkins said the incident highlights the importance of having backup plans when critical technology services go down.

“We live in a technology world right now,” he said. “All companies need to build in strategic defenses that say, ‘If something goes down, what am I doing? What’s my backup?’”

Jenkins said outages have become more frequent as companies push updates and patches to address security threats. He said the systems are complex and difficult to build, and that changing them can introduce risk even as failing to update them may leave them vulnerable to attack.

“Every time you make a change to the system, you create risk in that system,” Jenkins said. “And if you don’t make a change, you may get hacked.”