Users of various Microsoft tools, including Outlook email, are reporting problems sending and receiving messages.
Microsoft's status website acknowledged the problem on Thursday afternoon.
"Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods," a message on the Microsoft page read in part.
"We’ve collected networking logs to further investigate the source of these errors and confirm our next steps."
According to Downdetector, which has become an online staple in monitoring internet cuts, users around the globe are also experiencing problems with Microsoft Teams, Copilot and Teams.
For Outlook specifically, Microsoft has classified the issue as being a "service degradation".
A subsequent social media post from the company explained efforts to rectify the problem.
"We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load," Microsoft said.
As of 2:10 PM, data from Downdetector indicated that services started to recover for some users.
For many, however, problems continued for several hours.
Microsoft later confirmed via its service health status update page that the technical issue was broadly impacting the company's Microsoft 365 productivity software suite.
The technology firm also said it was able to gain more insights into the cause of the problem experience by so many users around the globe.
"We determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable," the update read.
Governments and various companies around the world were also impacted by the problem.
As a result, many of them sought to calm the frustrations felt by patrons and customers through social media posts.
"Due to a widescale outage impacting Microsoft 365 across North America, the State of Michigan is currently experiencing technical issues with email and other Microsoft applications," a post from Michigan's department of technology, management and budget read, adding that "responses to emails may be delayed during this time."
Later in the evening, Microsoft said that it was still trying to open "all available pathways to restore service", but lamented that those efforts "have not provided the anticipated relief."
The company indicated that it was pursuing a different strategy of "re-isolating a portion of infrastructure" and also restarting certain components that it speculated was causing the problem.
More than seven hours after the problem first surfaced, Microsoft warned that certain servers returned to service might become unresponsive once traffic starts moving through them.
"We're analyzing diagnostic data to determine what's triggering the behavior ... in parallel, we're temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in some location," the company posted on X.
This is a developing story ...
