Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts North American Users

A widespread outage struck Microsoft 365 services Thursday afternoon, disrupting access to email, file storage, online meetings and administrative tools for tens of thousands of users across North America. The issue, which began around 2:30 p.m. ET, primarily affected enterprise customers and businesses reliant on the cloud-based platforms.

Microsoft acknowledged the problem in a post on X from its Microsoft 365 status account, stating, "We're investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Further information can be found in the admin center under MO1221364." The company later identified the root cause as a failure in a portion of its North American infrastructure that was not processing traffic as expected. Engineers are working to restore the affected systems to a healthy state and reroute traffic to minimize disruptions, though no estimated time for full recovery has been provided.

The outage impacted a range of core functions. Users reported errors such as "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" when trying to send or receive emails via Outlook and Exchange Online, including notifications...