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 most of the people reporting issues say Teams is still working now.

Now Microsoft says:

We’ve completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We’re also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we’re investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.

but it’s 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.

• Richard Lawler