Microsoft Outlook outage leaves tens of thousands unable to reach their email

Microsoft’s Outlook email service suffered a widespread outage on Thursday, 12 November, with users unable to open their mailboxes or send messages, or shown error messages. Downdetector, a site where users report service problems, logged more than 60,000 reports in the United States alone and more than 3,300 in Britain within 20 minutes, the Manchester Evening News reported.

Microsoft said on its status account on X that it was investigating reports of users having trouble reaching Exchange Online mailboxes through several connection methods in the Americas. It later confirmed the problem could affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region. Company administrators can follow the incident in the Microsoft 365 admin centre under the number EX1550543.

Teams, Microsoft’s workplace chat tool, was also disrupted in North America. Microsoft later said Teams had been restored, although some users continued to report connection problems.

Why Outlook is down

Microsoft first said part of its infrastructure in several regions was under elevated load. It later said the load was not caused by a rise in traffic but by a number of servers becoming unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure.

“We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service,” Microsoft said. At the time of publication the company had not said when Outlook would be fully restored.

What to do if your email will not open

If Outlook will not load or messages are not going out, check the Microsoft 365 status page at status.cloud.microsoft or the Microsoft 365 Status account on X first. If the outage is confirmed there, the problem is on Microsoft’s side, not on your computer or phone. Office staff can ask their IT administrator for the latest, as administrators can see the incident in the admin centre.