Microsoft Outlook continues to be unavailable for people, businesses, and public services across the globe, leaving people unable to access their email, either through the web or apps. Reports around the issue starting rolling in at around 1PM ET on Thursday, with Microsoft since confirming that the outage is impacting Microsoft 365 features that interact with Exchange Online and email services, including SharePoint Online, Teams, Copilot AI, and other 365 business services.
Ongoing outage
Microsoft Outlook is still down
Microsoft 365 issues have been cutting people off from their email since early Thursday afternoon, and they still aren’t fixed.
Microsoft 365 issues have been cutting people off from their email since early Thursday afternoon, and they still aren’t fixed.
Image: The Verge
When the outage issues were first identified on Thursday, Microsoft acknowledged from its Microsoft 365 Status account that “We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.” Microsoft has gone through several variations of update notes since then, providing suprisingly detailed bulletins about the issues and its attempts to fix them. While Microsoft said it initially had problems rebooting servers and being able to monitor their health, its last few updates say that recovery efforts are going well:
We’re seeing early stabilization and capacity improvements as recovery actions continue. To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours.
Recovery actions are ongoing across affected Microsoft 365 infrastructure and progressing in phases. We’re seeing incremental improvement in several workloads, but service health remains variable and capacity has not yet fully returned to baseline.
We’ve made additional progress toward recovery, with actions now completed across portions of affected infrastructure and traffic being gradually restored. We’re seeing improvements in key scenarios, including mailbox access and delayed email processing, though some intermittent issues may continue. Our focus is extending these recovery actions across remaining affected infrastructure while continuing stabilization and adding capacity to improve consistency.
There’s still no ETA for full restoration, but we will continue to monitor this ongoing outage.
Update, November 13th: Updated with the latest information from Microsoft.
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