Microsoft Outlook is down

Over the last hour or so, reports have come in from around the world that people can’t access their Outlook email, either through the web or apps. Microsoft has acknowledged the issue from its Microsoft 365 Status account, saying that “We’ve determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.”

There were also some reports of problems with Teams, but some of the people reporting issues say Teams is still working now.

Now, as of 3:30PM ET, Microsoft says:

While we haven’t identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that’s responsible for processing them.

We’re deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we’ve taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We’re also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.

But it’s still unclear how long it will take before access is restored, or if that will fix all of the issues people are seeing. On DownDetector, reports of issues with Outlook started to spike just before 1PM ET, and they have not completely gone away yet. It’s also probably not the best sign that we’re struggling to consistently load Microsoft’s own status pages to check on progress. If there are any more details, we will update this article.

Update, 3:42PM ET: Added latest status update from Microsoft.