The initial reports from Microsoft were of users in the Americas who couldn't connect to their Exchange Online mailboxes (Exchange Online supports Outlook email). Microsoft subsequently stated that users in any region could be impacted. Portugal was one of the countries where users reported the issue.

Some users were unable to sign in or open their inbox. Others were getting error messages or having trouble sending and receiving email. Downdetector (which collects user reports) had over 1,000 reports of issues with Microsoft services in Portugal, according to Jornal de Negócios. That figure is the number of reports on the Downdetector site, not necessarily the total number of people affected.

Outlook was clearly the primary issue, though it wasn't the only Microsoft service in trouble. Users were also reporting problems with OneDrive and Microsoft stated that its investigation into the issue included problems with Teams in North America. The company cautioned that a range of Microsoft 365 services which rely on Exchange Online could be impacted.

The outage was also being reported in other countries. At the peak of the incident Downdetector had over 130,000 reports of Outlook issues globally. Microsoft stated the issue was due to high load on parts of its infrastructure in a number of regions, which was in turn causing connection errors for users attempting to access their mailboxes.

The company started to redirect traffic via other parts of its network and restarting of the affected servers. They stated that their engineers were looking at the network data to determine what was causing the connection issues. That work didn't result in an immediate return to normal service and Microsoft gave no timescale for when all the affected services would be back.

For users in Portugal, it meant that the standard Microsoft tools they'd normally use for their work email and personal email could be unreliable for part of the day. You might have been able to use one of the services and not the other depending on which of the Microsoft systems their account was going to.

The disruption impacted Microsoft 365 services in a number of regions. Microsoft's updates stated that they were still working to restore service and manage traffic across their network.

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