Microsoft said its Outlook email service is experiencing an outage that is preventing users from accessing their inboxes. The issue was first flagged as affecting the U.S. and the Americas, and was later expanded to affect "any region." Microsoft has not given a specific cause, but said it was providing updates through its admin center, which was not reachable at the time of publication.

In a post on X for users who cannot access the admin center, Microsoft said some of its infrastructure was experiencing "elevated load" and that it was "redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load." The outage was reported to have affected users across the nation on November 12, according to a report on the day's disruption.S1S2

The disruption follows Microsoft's last major incident in September, when a days-long outage hit Microsoft 365, the online productivity suite that includes Outlook. During that outage, Microsoft blamed a "core authentication configuration" issue that prevented users from accessing the service. It remains unclear to what extent the current outage extends to other services.S1