Millions of users around the world were left unable to access their email as Microsoft’s Outlook service experienced a widespread outage that lasted several hours from late Wednesday into Thursday. The disruption affected Outlook.com, as well as the platform’s mobile and desktop applications.
The problem was first detected around 6:20 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. Users began flooding social media platforms with reports of error messages, delayed access, and complete inability to load their inboxes. Many shared screenshots showing a “something went wrong” message on their Outlook dashboards, sparking frustration across both individual and enterprise users who rely on the service for daily communication.
Microsoft acknowledged the incident via its online dashboard and through official social media accounts. By early Thursday afternoon, the company announced it had identified the root cause of the issue and was implementing a fix. It noted that configuration changes made on targeted infrastructure had begun resolving the issue and that those changes were being deployed globally to restore service for all users.
According to updates provided during the incident, most users were expected to regain access within two hours of the global rollout. The company also stated that it would continue monitoring systems to ensure stability.
The outage highlights the challenges large-scale cloud services face in maintaining 24/7 uptime, especially for platforms with hundreds of millions of active users. While Outlook remains a key email service provider, it competes with other dominant platforms such as Apple Mail and Gmail, which, according to analytics firms, have larger market shares in the global email client landscape.
The incident serves as a reminder of how reliant modern work and communication systems have become on cloud-based email infrastructure. For many users — including businesses, professionals, and students — prolonged email disruption translates to missed deadlines, lost messages, and operational delays.
As services were restored, many users reported that Outlook resumed normal functionality by Thursday afternoon, though some noted minor lag or errors persisting into the evening.
Microsoft has not released a detailed technical explanation of the outage but is expected to follow up with a full post-incident review. In the meantime, users are advised to check the service status dashboard for updates and to ensure their apps are fully updated to receive any new configurations deployed during the fix.
