WASHINGTON, DC — MICROSOFT has confirmed a disruption affecting its email services, leaving users in several parts of the world unable to access their accounts for much of the day.
The disruption, which began at approximately 1:00 p.m. St. Kitts time, affected Microsoft 365 users, with reports of difficulties accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods.
In a series of updates posted on X, the technology giant acknowledged the problem and said its technical teams were investigating reports of connectivity issues initially affecting users in the Americas.
Microsoft subsequently confirmed that the disruption could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity in any region, suggesting that the problem had extended beyond its initial reported area.
"We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors," the company stated.
As efforts to restore normal service continued, Microsoft said it had begun redistributing connection traffic across its global infrastructure to ease the pressure on affected systems.
The company also disclosed that it was restarting and testing affected servers as part of its recovery efforts. At the same time, engineers were assessing whether reversing some recently implemented configuration updates could help speed up the restoration process.
The company also directed users who were unable to access the administration centre to its service-status website, status.cloud.microsoft.
The outage disrupted access to an email platform widely used by businesses, government agencies and individuals for daily communication and other work-related activities.
Microsoft has not yet provided a definitive timeline for the full restoration of services.
