Thousands of customers reported difficulties accessing Microsoft services on Thursday, as a disruption affected multiple tools within the Microsoft 365 suite, including Outlook, Teams and other applications.

According to outage-tracking site Downdetector, users began flagging problems Thursday afternoon, with reports surging around 3 p.m. ET, when roughly 16,000 users said they were unable to access Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft acknowledged the issue on its service status page, saying that some users “may be experiencing degraded functionality or be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services.”

At 4:14 p.m. ET, the company said in a post on X that it had restored the affected infrastructure to a healthy state. However, Microsoft later clarified that engineers were still rebalancing traffic across impacted systems to ensure full stability.

Despite the update, some users continued to report problems later in the afternoon. “We cannot even email. This is not fixed,” one user wrote on X. Others called on Microsoft to compensate customers, saying the outage disrupted work and productivity.

Last week, Verizon offered affected customers a $20 credit following a major wireless outage, prompting some Microsoft users to suggest similar compensation.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to questions about the cause of the disruption.

The incident follows previous large-scale outages tied to Microsoft services. In 2024, a faulty update to CrowdStrikeantivirus software triggered global disruptions affecting Microsoft 365 users, leading to thousands of flight delays and impacting hospitals, banks and businesses worldwide.