Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft 365 Services Hit by Widespread Outage

People, businesses, and public services around the world have been unable to use Microsoft Outlook since early Thursday afternoon, with email access cut off through both the web and apps. Reports began around 1 p.m. ET, The Verge reported.

The outage affects more than email. According to Engadget, Microsoft's status page showed possible impacts on Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot 365, and Defender XDR. By 5 p.m. ET, the affected set had also grown to include Purview, Planner, To Do, Intune, and Defender for Office 365. Power BI and the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center also experienced issues. At 2:15 p.m. ET, many Engadget staff could not load Microsoft’s service status page. While the status report focused on the business and enterprise versions of the 365 tools, individual users seemed to be affected as well.

Downdetector showed more than 100,000 Outlook outage reports on Thursday, 9to5Mac reported. 9to5Mac published a Microsoft status update saying the company had paused all deployments and configuration changes while reviewing recent changes. Microsoft said the higher load came from "a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable," not from more traffic overall.

The Verge reported that Microsoft’s Microsoft 365 Status account initially said a "portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors." Later updates described recovery progress. "We’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue," one update said. Another said "service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline." The company has extended email timeout to 48 hours to preserve delayed mail.

By Thursday night, Microsoft said additional progress had been made and traffic was being gradually restored. An update posted to the Microsoft 365 Status account on X said, "We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue." Still, there was no estimated time for full restoration.

On Friday morning, Microsoft said recovery was continuing. "We’re seeing continued recovery progress across affected regions, with broader improvements in North America, sustained improvements across much of Europe, and encouraging recovery signals in Asia Pacific," the company wrote on X, according to Engadget. Some people might still have trouble accessing the service or receive email late. The company said it was working to keep recovered systems stable, finish fixes in other areas, and clear out the backlog of delayed email.