Microsoft Outlook outage reported by thousands of users on Monday

On Monday afternoon, thousands of users reported experiencing issues with Microsoft Outlook. By late morning, the number of complaints surged on Downdetector, jumping from around 37 reports to over 6,000 within minutes. Users were experiencing a variety of problems, with the most frequent being difficulties sending and receiving messages, along with app-related issues and login problems.

Microsoft acknowledged the outage on its status page on X, a platform they use to communicate service status. They stated they were investigating reports of Exchange Online issues, directing affected users to a specific incident number for further updates. An hour later, Microsoft confirmed the scope of the problem, stating that users might be experiencing degraded functionality across various Exchange Online features.

The company revealed it was reviewing service telemetry and diagnostic data to determine the root cause of the problem. As of the latest update, Microsoft had identified an issue with an authentication component that was contributing to the disruption. They have developed a remediation strategy and are testing it to ensure it resolves the issue before implementing it more broadly. At the time of writing, however, Microsoft's Service Health Status page indicates that all its products are operating normally.