Microsoft Outlook users experience hourslong outage impacting email access

Key Points

• After an hours-long outage that began late Wednesday and extended into Thursday, Microsoft confirmed that Outlook email access is now fully restored.
• Microsoft 365 initially deployed a fix for the outage but encountered delays when the “initial fix” failed, eventually resolving the issue with a configuration change by 3:30 p.m. ET.
• Disruptions peaked just before noon ET when over 2,700 users reported problems like inbox loading and sign-in failures, before dropping to a few hundred by afternoon.
• Microsoft has not disclosed the underlying cause of the outage and offered no further comment when asked by The Associated Press.

NEW YORK (AP) — After Outlook users ran into issues accessing their email accounts late Wednesday and into Thursday, Microsoft says that affected systems are back online.

Microsoft 365 first said that it was investigating an issue with Outlook Wednesday night, and later shared it was deploying a fix. But there were some delays — with the company noting that it encountered a problem with its “initial fix," for example.

Disruptions appeared to peak just before noon ET on Thursday, when more than 2,700 users worldwide reported issues with Outlook, formerly also Hotmail, to outage tracker Downdetector. Some said they encountered problems like loading their inboxes or signing in.

By later in the afternoon, reports had fallen to just over a couple hundred. And in an update on social media shortly after 3:30 p.m. ET, Microsoft 365 said that a configuration change had “fully saturated throughout the affected environments and resolved impact for all users.”

“Everything is up and running,” Microsoft's status page added.

Microsoft did not immediately provide more information about what had caused the hourslong outage. A spokesperson for Microsoft had no further comment when reached by The Associated Press on Thursday.