Microsoft Outlook Suffers Widespread Outage, Leaving Users Locked Out for Hours
Microsoft’s Outlook email service experienced a major disruption this week, with users across the globe facing hours of downtime on Wednesday and Thursday.
The issue began around 6:20 p.m. ET on Wednesday, affecting Outlook.com as well as its mobile and desktop applications. Users flooded social media with complaints, sharing error messages and screenshots showing “something went wrong” notifications as they were unable to access their inboxes.
By Thursday afternoon, Microsoft acknowledged the problem and announced that a fix was being implemented. According to a status update posted on X, the company said, “Our configuration changes have effectively resolved impact in targeted infrastructure. We’re now deploying the changes worldwide to resolve impact for all users.”
The company’s service dashboard indicated that most users would see improvements within a couple of hours, though monitoring would continue until the issue was fully resolved.
Despite the recovery process beginning, the outage sparked frustration among users, especially given Outlook’s large user base. While Outlook remains widely used, it trails behind email services from Google and Apple in global popularity, according to data from industry analytics.
