Outlook Outage: Microsoft’s Email Service Goes Down Nationwide
What happened
Microsoft's Outlook email service failed worldwide on Thursday, leaving tens of thousands of business and consumer users unable to open their inboxes.
Outage tracker Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 Outlook problem reports shortly after 1pm Eastern Time, falling to about 50,000 by 4.30pm, CNA reported.
Microsoft first said the problem affected the Americas, then widened that to users in any region.
The company blamed "elevated load" on its infrastructure and later said a large number of servers were unexpectedly unavailable, without explaining why, according to TechCrunch.
Teams, SharePoint, Copilot, OneDrive and Defender XDR were also affected, Microsoft said.
By about 6pm Eastern, Microsoft said it had begun returning some servers to service and was seeing limited recovery in some regions, according to The Verge.
“We are aware and investigating reports of users experiencing issues with Microsoft 365 services, primarily issues with Exchange Online.”
The Verge
Summary written by AI from 3 independent sources (CNA, TechCrunch, The Verge) and checked automatically against them for copied text and numbers that are not in the sources. How we work
Open on the live globe →Who reported it
- 2026-11-12 18:32 UTCCNA · channelnewsasia.com ↗
- 2026-11-12 18:39 UTCVariety · variety.com ↗
- 2026-11-12 19:03 UTCTechCrunch · techcrunch.com ↗
- 2026-11-12 19:07 UTCThe Verge · theverge.com ↗
- 2026-11-12 19:11 UTCANSA · ansa.it ↗
- 2026-11-12 20:01 UTCWired · wired.com ↗
- 2026-11-12 20:31 UTCABC · abc.net.au ↗
- 2026-11-12 20:54 UTCPrensa Libre · prensalibre.com ↗
- 2026-11-12 22:24 UTCCNBC · cnbc.com ↗
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