Microsoft Outlook email went down on Thursday afternoon, with users around the world reporting that they could not access their mailboxes through the web or apps. Microsoft acknowledged the problem through its Microsoft 365 Status account on X, first saying it was investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.

The company's initial description suggested the problem was concentrated in the Americas, but it later said the issue could affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region. The company said more information would be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under the reference EX1550543.S2S1

Outage monitoring platform DownDetector showed error reports spiking around 12:30 p.m. ET, and by 1:12 p.m. ET the service had received more than 130,000 reports. Virtually all Microsoft services showed elevated error reports, including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Teams. Microsoft said the affected services included Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR, while Microsoft's consumer products were expected to be operational.S2S3

Business communications were heavily disrupted, as Outlook is widely used across sectors. Microsoft said it was actively working to mitigate the problems and deploying fixes to restore services as quickly as possible. By the afternoon, the Microsoft service status page was loading normally again. The outage follows an earlier widespread Outlook outage in August, when the company blamed a misconfiguration that prevented authentication components from deploying correctly.S2S3