Is Microsoft Outlook Still Down? Company Says ‘We’re Continuing to See Improvements’

Here’s where you need to pay close attention. The steps you take to recover your Microsoft emails and meetings are crucial. 

Waseem Ahmed, head of engineering at Secure.com, a cybersecurity company, said you should expect your mail to arrive in batches and out of order. You shouldn’t resend everything. Instead, check the Sent and Outbox first and only resend urgent emails. 

Ahmed also advises not reinstalling Outlook or resetting your password to fix it. You should ignore any messages asking you to do so because Microsoft will not ask for that. Lastly, check your calendar to make sure it’s up to date and confirm any meetings by phone or text. And if something is time-sensitive has not arrived after 48 hours, ask the sender to resend it. 

In the meantime, exercise caution because bad actors are looking to take advantage by offering resolutions and assurances, said Aiden Sinnott, the principal threat researcher of the Sophos Counter Threat Unit, a cyber threat intelligence and research group.  “At this time, even more so than usual, people should exercise caution when receiving emails, texts or calls purporting to be from Microsoft or other affected businesses particularly banks, or shops,” said Sinnott. “Be aware of requests for urgent action, sharing of personal information and avoid clicking on links sent via message or email.”

TokenCore’s CEO, Kevin Surace, said even though Microsoft’s outage was likely not a cyberattack, there’s a bigger problem at hand. It could have been an internal software update or infrastructure change with a bug that wasn’t caught before deployment. 

But even that oversight comes with big consequences — as we can tell. 

“While Microsoft is still investigating, the cascading failures suggest that when one part of a massive cloud service goes down, the remaining infrastructure can quickly become overwhelmed. The bigger issue is that we’ve allowed much of society to become dependent on a handful of cloud providers.” 

Surace said that even a relatively small software mistake can potentially disrupt businesses and individuals around the world. 

“We’ve built an incredibly interconnected digital world, but that interconnectedness also means a single failure can have enormous consequences,” Surace said. 

Microsoft shared an update on the global outage with CNET.

“We’re seeing encouraging recovery progress, with service availability and email delivery performance improving across a growing portion of affected infrastructure,” Charles Lamanna, executive vice president for Copilot, Agents and Platform at Microsoft, said in an emailed statement. 

It’s a relief that some of Microsoft’s services are being restored but what does that mean for your emails that may have been lost in the meantime? Ryan McCurdy, vice president of Liquibase, a database change governance platform, said an outage doesn’t automatically mean data has been lost or compromised. 

“From what’s been reported, Microsoft has been dealing with delayed email delivery and working through message backlogs. That’s different from losing the underlying data.”

McCurdy said he still wants Microsoft to confirm whether any messages failed permanently and if you’ll need to take additional steps to retrieve them.

Some companies seem to be back up and running smoothly with Microsoft applications, but not everyone. Camden, New Jersey’s municipal office posted an update on X.

Other social media accounts are reporting similar messages of Microsoft’s services being restored but cautions to still expect disruptions as Microsoft gradually restores service for Teams, 365 services, Copilot and Outlook.

Microsoft’s most recent status update, around 9 a.m. ET, indicates the company is addressing the bulk of the problem while still monitoring and dealing with residual issues.

As for what’s behind all this: The company says it will share a post-event report once it’s done dealing with the problems. “At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident,” Microsoft said.

Being able to access your email client is only half the battle. Getting and sending emails is another story.

Comments on Downdetector indicate some people are seeing Microsoft Outlook and other services back to full functionality. But others say they’ve started the Friday the 13th workday with some problems still lingering.

“Not getting new emails this morning,” one user commented. “Received yesterday’s emails but then it stopped.”

Microsoft acknowledges as much in its latest status page update: “Some users may still experience intermittent access issues or delayed email delivery as recovery continues.”

While the number of issues reported on Downdetector is down significantly from Thursday’s peak, it’s still pretty high — around 8,000 Friday morning.

In a status update on X from 7:09 a.m. ET on Friday, Microsoft says that it’s “seeing encouraging recovery progress.” Email delivery, the company said, is seeing improvement across “a growing portion” of the Microsoft 365 infrastructure, though “some users may still experience intermittent issues.” As it works to get everything running smoothly again, Microsoft said, it’s “prioritizing email queue and backlog reduction.”

In a post on the Microsoft cloud service health status page from 7:58 a.m. ET on Friday, the company noted “broader improvements” in North America, “sustained improvements” across much of Europe and “encouraging recovery signals” in the Asia Pacific region. Microsoft also said that it has no evidence that malicious activity was at play in the outage.

Many people who rely on Microsoft Outlook and the company’s other programs didn’t get a lot of work done on Thursday, and it’s unclear if Friday will be much better. Beginning Thursday around 1 p.m. ET, Outlook, Office 365, Copilot, Teams, and the Microsoft Store all experienced outages, and as late as 11 p.m. ET, the problems persisted.

“We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they’re not taking as expected,” the company said in a social media update posted around 10:15 p.m. ET. “We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.”

The company also said it was reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing.

Users can monitor official updates about the outages on the company’s service health page and on social media.

While the issue was serious for companies that rely on the affected products, others found the funny side in not being able to work.

“Unlike Microsoft Outlook, these bad boys never go down,” joked the official account for Encyclopaedia Britannica, posting a photo of the company’s encyclopedias.

Another post cracked, “My theory is that someone at Microsoft finally decided no one should ever have to use Teams again, and this was the only way to make that happen without having some really hard conversations at work.” (Yet other workers were disappointed because, for them, Teams was one of the few Microsoft products still working.)

And one X user spoke for many hopeful workers, writing, “Don’t fix Outlook until 4:30pm tomorrow.”

The Microsoft problems that began Thursday around 1 p.m. ET are not over yet, even as 8 p.m. approaches on the East Coast. In fact, Microsoft products fill five of the top six slots on Down Detector’s list of sites reporting the most errors Thursday evening.

Microsoft Outlook remains the top site for error reports, with about 30,000 reports as of 7:55 p.m. ET. It’s followed by Microsoft 365, the Microsoft Store, Microsoft Copilot, internet provider Clear Wave Fiber and Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft customers can monitor the company’s updates on the company’s service health page and on social media.

The latest updates on the service health page notes that while Microsoft has returned some servers to service, those are becoming unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. The company says it is analyzing the situation and also temporarily limiting traffic in specific locations.

“Additionally, we’re rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we’ll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results,” the service health page notes.

Clear Wave Fiber, the only non-Microsoft site in Down Detector’s top six, is a regional internet provider in the South and Midwest. Its main site was not loading for CNET editors Thursday evening, and customers were discussing the outage on various social platforms.

Good news, maybe? Around 6 p.m. ET, Microsoft posted to social media that the company was bringing a portion of the affected servers back into service.

“We’re returning a portion of affected servers to the service, and they remain stable so far,” the post read in part. “We’re also shifting traffic to alternate routes wherever possible and observing limited recovery. In parallel, we’ve streamlined the process of returning the remaining affected servers to service. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect.”

Outage-reporting site Down Detector was still showing 32,000 reports of problems at 6:40 p.m., compared to 130,000 reports at the outage’s apparent peak, around 1:15 p.m. ET.

Microsoft’s major outage, affecting Outlook, Microsoft 365, Copilot, Teams and more, hit hard on Thursday, and is still continuing. But if you’re feeling déjà vu, there’s good reason. We did just go through this.

Back at the end of summer, on Monday Aug. 31, users were unable to access Outlook due to problems with Microsoft Exchange Online, which Outlook uses for mailbox access and email delivery. Problems lingered for some users even as we rolled into September that week. On Thursday, Sept. 3, a Microsoft representative told CNET in an email that things were back to normal.

But was it? That Friday morning, Downdetector was still showing hundreds of people still reporting issues with Outlook, although that was way down from the thousands reported earlier in the week.

Microsoft later blamed a “core authentication configuration” issue for that late-summer outage. The company is not blaming that same cause this time around.

This time, Microsoft said that a number of servers had become “unexpectedly unavailable” and that the company was testing a workaround.

No question, Thursday’s outage affecting Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365, Copilot, and more is a serious situation, especially for hospitals and other healthcare services.

The Facebook account for the University of Iowa Health Care system posted an update noting that “due to the widespread Microsoft 365 and Outlook outage, we are experiencing issues with our email and voicemail system across all UI Health Care campuses.”

The post asked patients who are trying to contact their care team to use the MyChart messaging system.

But for those whose jobs are a little less vital, a short break from being chained to the computer was welcome.

“Can somebody point out who at Microsoft caused the outage so I can send them a Christmas card and ask their lead to give them a raise?” wrote one Reddit user. “I was feeling burnt out and underappreciated at work. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to not work.”

One person in that Reddit thread reported that their company sent all office workers home and told them they could work from there if Outlook came back online.

The services are still down, but someone at Microsoft is certainly keeping the updates coming. In the latest update, posted to X at 12:19 pm PT, the company blamed one specific component, but did not identify it.

“We’ve not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that’s responsible for processing server health,” the post reads. “We’ve taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service.”

Users, however, want to know more.

“Dude in simple English, have you been hacked or nah?” wrote one X user.

Microsoft reports in a new update posted just before noon PT that the company is “testing a configuration change to address a problem that’s causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable.”

The company says, “we’ve initiated a restart of all affected servers and are monitoring health as they return to service.”

Or, as one X user noted, “so basically you’re turning it off and turning it back on.”

The latest from Microsoft’s status page is that the company is trying a few things to try to fix the problem… or at least keep it from getting worse: “As a precaution, we’ve paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We’ve also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.”

The r/Outlook subreddit is busy, even if the emails are not flying.

In one thread, users weighed whether an Outlook outage was the “adult version of a snow day” and discussed… what’s for lunch.

Then there are people who have access to only one Microsoft service: Teams. Teams, the app your boss uses to message you vague things. “Teams is the only thing I wish was always down,” one user lamented.

I was finally able to pull up Microsoft’s service status page. It’s showing a general alert that users might not be able to connect to multiple services, naming Exchange Online, Teams, Sharepoint Online, Copilot 365 and Microsoft Defender XDR.

“We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we’ve determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors,” Microsoft’s update said. “We’re restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it’s contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we’re evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.”

With some of Microsoft’s services seeing issues, other services that connect with Microsoft are reporting problems of their own. OpenAI and Anthropic are both saying they’re having issues with connectors between their chatbot and AI services and Microsoft 365.

“Mail, calendar and search tools are failing for most requests, and new connections to the connector may not complete,” Anthropic’s update said. “We are in contact with them and will provide an update as soon as possible.”