Microsoft Outlook is down for many: Here's what we know

While Microsoft's teams are working on a fix, impacted folks are still taking to social networks like X and Threads to comment and even offer a bit of joy in light of not being able to use Outlook or other 365 essentials.

Microsoft is rolling out a fix or two

Some good news correlating with that slight dip on Down Detector: it appears that Microsoft's team is on the case and is now testing a fix, well, more specifically, two fixes concurrently. It seems that a main culprit was servers failing automated health checks and, as a result, becoming unavailable to users.

To address that, Microsoft is testing a configuration change and, at the same time, restarting each affected service to let them 'return to service.' That's a good sign all around.

Let's take a look at Down Detector

Alright, it's clear that the main services seeing outages, and in turn being effectively down for users right now, are Outlook as well as Microsoft 365, but Down Detector is currently showing a slight dip towards recovery. Even so, many users are still reporting errors.

In fact, even with the dip, Microsoft Outlook still shows over 77,000 reports. That is down from the high, as of yet, of over 131,000 reports.

Microsoft's status page still isn't loading

We're still waiting for another update from Microsoft 365 Status on X (formerly Twitter), but if you're hoping to check the company's direct status page, you'll hit a roadblock. Why? Well, the actual status page appears to be down as well and will not load.

What is real

As we noted earlier, big outages like this can have a knock-on effect. That's likely why cloud provider Cloudflare has popped up here on DownDetector, along with Google and Gmail. To be clear, there's no other indication that these services are experiencing similar outages.

Some perspective

Sure, millions can't access work and personal emails, but they still have social media where they can complain or at least take their minds off the fact that a huge chunk of Microsoft products are currently not functioning. As this X user notes, at least social media isn't out.

We're still not here

By 2:25 PM ET, DownDetector was showing a small slowdown in outage reports across Microsoft services, but social media is still filled with posts about the ongoing Outlook outage that is across the US and the rest of the Americas.

What, we work?

Millions rely on Microsoft tools like Outlook and OneDrive to get work done. When they're offline, well, as you can see below, things kind of slow down.

Microsoft knows

A Microsoft 365 support account has acknowledged the issues across "the Americas" and wrote, "We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543."

So they're investigating, but there's no news of a fix, just that they're working to mitigate it.

When one service catches a cold...

A look at DownDetector indicates that it's not just Outlook and Microsoft services that are struggling. However, these user-based reports can be misleading. Sometimes when people can't access one service connected to larger services, they assume it's their local one.

We checked, for instance, AWS's status page and found no widespread reports of outages.

Not everything is offline

There are some indications that the situation is worsening. While we were able to access OneDrive online 30 minutes ago, the site is no longer responding.

The pain is being felt by individuals and organizations, such as universities, where entire email systems are now inaccessible.

Our first indication that something was awry with Outlook was on Downdetector, which noted a sharp rise in reports of service outages for Outlook. Microsoft 365, Microsoft Store, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Azure.

It's worth noting that users report these issues to Downdetector. Microsoft has yet to comment or confirm any of this.

We've contacted Microsoft for comment and will update this live blog when they reply.