Microsoft 365 Outage Cause Identified in North America

Microsoft says an internal dependency failure in its North America region triggered the Microsoft 365 outage that disrupted Outlook and Teams for many users. While most services are recovering, the company acknowledged continued turbulence as it gradually redistributes traffic to stabilize the platform.

What Microsoft Says Happened During the Outage

According to Microsoft’s service health updates, a component that other Microsoft 365 services rely on stopped handling requests as expected. That dependency—part of the shared infrastructure layer that supports core apps—caused requests to pile up, leading to failures in email delivery, Teams messaging, and related workloads.

Engineers are responding by rebalancing traffic across unaffected capacity in the region. The company is taking an incremental approach, shifting users in measured waves to avoid overloading healthy clusters and to pinpoint any lingering bottlenecks. This is a standard site reliability tactic: ramp…