Outlook email outage affects users around the world

Users of Microsoft's Outlook email and other Microsoft tools are experiencing difficulties sending and receiving messages. Microsoft's status website confirmed the issue on Thursday afternoon, stating that users may have trouble connecting to their mailboxes in Exchange Online via multiple connection methods. The company is currently investigating the cause.

Microsoft has gathered networking logs to further examine the source of the errors and determine the next steps. According to Downdetector, a website that monitors internet outages, users worldwide are also facing problems with Microsoft Teams, Copilot, and Teams. For Outlook specifically, Microsoft categorizes the issue as a "service degradation."

In an effort to resolve the problem, Microsoft began redistributing connection traffic across its global infrastructure to balance the load. By 2:10 PM, users began to see improvements, although some continued to experience issues for several hours. Microsoft later confirmed via its service health status update page that the technical problem was affecting Microsoft 365 productivity software globally.

Various governments and companies around the world were impacted by the widespread outage. Some, like the State of Michigan, acknowledged the technical difficulties and warned that responses to emails may be delayed. This situation is still developing.