Microsoft Outlook Users Face Email Service Outage

NEW YORK — Several thousand users experienced issues with Microsoft Outlook late Wednesday night and into Thursday morning. Many reported problems accessing their inboxes, signing in, and sending emails.

Microsoft acknowledged the outage on its Microsoft 365 status page, stating that it was investigating the issue on Wednesday night. The company later announced it was deploying a fix, but as of Thursday morning, services had not fully restored. They indicated that an initial remedy had encountered problems.

“We identified an issue with the initial fix, and we’ve corrected it,” Microsoft 365 Status reported on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, Thursday morning. “We’re continuing to deploy the fix and monitoring the situation closely.”

As of around 10 a.m. ET on Thursday, nearly 2,200 users worldwide had reported problems with Outlook, according to an outage tracker. Some users stated they were informed they did not have a valid license for the service, while others found the platform running slowly.

Reports indicated that 62% of users were unable to log into Microsoft Outlook. While there is speculation about the cause, the specifics remain unclear. Recent outages have sometimes resulted from mundane technical updates rather than security threats.

Microsoft also confirmed that the email services affected include Outlook.com, Outlook Mobile, and the Outlook desktop client. The tech giant stated on Thursday, “We’ve determined the cause of the issue and have deployed a fix. We’re closely monitoring its deployment and expect the issue to gradually resolve as deployment progresses.”

This story is developing, and more information will be provided as it becomes available.