Microsoft Outlook Hit by Fresh Global Outage as Exchange Online Users Lose Email Access

In brief

• Microsoft's Outlook email service and other Microsoft 365 products suffered a multi-hour outage on Thursday.
• Downdetector recorded about 130,000 Outlook reports in the evening, falling to about 50,000 later.
• Microsoft blamed a large number of unexpectedly unavailable servers and said systems were gradually recovering.

Outage spreads from the Americas to other regions

Microsoft first reported problems with Exchange Online mailboxes in the United States and the Americas, with users in North and South America unable to reach their mailboxes over several connection methods (Auch Outlook betroffen: Microsoft-Dienste weltweit mit Störungen – tagesschau.de). The company later said the problems could affect Microsoft 365 users worldwide (Microsoft: Großstörung sperrt weltweit Zehntausende Nutzer aus – DER SPIEGEL).

Reports climb into the evening

DownDetector recorded about 130,000 reports of Outlook problems around 7 p.m. Central European Time, falling to roughly 50,000 by 10:30 p.m.. Thousands of reports also concerned Microsoft Teams and the Copilot AI assistant, both part of Microsoft 365. Users reported being unable to send or receive email, or seeing messages arrive late (Sutriko daugelio bendrovės „Microsoft“ programų veikla – Diena.lt).

What Microsoft has said

Microsoft attributed the incident to a large number of servers becoming unavailable unexpectedly, without explaining why (Microsoft’s Outlook email hit by new outage – TechCrunch). The company said that some of its infrastructure in several regions was under elevated load, and that it was spreading connection traffic over its worldwide network to balance the strain. It also said a specific component responsible for processing server health may have been involved, and that steps had been taken to stop more servers from being affected (Is Microsoft Outlook Down? What We Know Now – cnet.com).

According to TechCrunch, the company's admin center was not reachable when the reports were filed, and Microsoft's own status page also appeared to fail to load at one point.

Other services affected

Beyond email, Microsoft said SharePoint and the Defender XDR security system were also disrupted, and consumers reported trouble reaching their OneDrive storage. Copilot was down as well.

Recovery

The outage lasted several hours. By the evening, Deutschlandfunk reported that Microsoft saw its systems gradually recover (US-Technologiekonzern - Microsoft: Stundenlanger Ausfall beeinträchtigt Outlook und Teams – Deutschlandfunk). Microsoft said it was continuing its investigation.