Microsoft Outlook Suffers Global Outage

Microsoft’s Outlook email service and has suffered a global outage, affecting the web, desktop, and mobile email platforms. Microsoft confirmed that users worldwide are having problems accessing their Exchange Online accounts.

“We’ve collected additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine the impact to our Exchange online protocols,” Microsoft said. “Additionally, we’ve identified this issue to be affecting users worldwide. Further details can be found in your admin centre under EX223208.”

The company added that it is reviewing recent changes to its service to further determine the cause of impact. “Users may experience problems with various Exchange Online protocols including Outlook desktop, mobile devices as well as those dependent on REST functionality,” Microsoft said.

Downdetector has also reported a major increase in downtime reports for Office 365. 66% of these reports are related to Outlook specifically, with 20% related to server connection issues.

Recent outage

This is the second time this week that Microsoft Cloud Services went down around the world. On 28 September, Microsoft suffered an outage which affected its most popular cloud services – Teams, Outlook, and Office 365.

“We’re investigating an issue affecting access to multiple Microsoft 365 services. We’re working to identify the full impact and will provide more information shortly,” the company said in a status update.

The company later explained that a recent update was the cause of the outage. “We’ve identified a recent change that appears to be the source of the issue. We’re rolling back the change to mitigate the impact,” said Microsoft.