Microsoft Outlook crashed for users across the country Thursday starting around 12:00 p.m. ET, cutting off access to email inboxes and other Microsoft 365 services.
Monitoring platform DownDetector recorded a sharp spike in error reports beginning around 12:30 p.m. Eastern. By 1:12 p.m. ET, more than 130,000 users had logged complaints. The trouble didn’t stop at Outlook — Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot and Microsoft Teams all showed elevated error reports as well.
Adding to the confusion, Microsoft’s own service status page failed to load for some people trying to check whether the outage was real or on their end. That suggested the failure reached deeper into Microsoft’s infrastructure than a single app glitch.
Microsoft confirmed in an updated post on X that the problem wasn’t limited to the Americas. “While we’re working to mitigate impact, we’ve confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543,” the company said.
Microsoft also pointed to the technical cause, stating that “a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors.” In other words, this wasn’t a localized hiccup — it was a strain on the company’s broader systems.
This is not the first time Outlook has gone dark this year. The service suffered a similar widespread outage in August 2026, which Microsoft at the time blamed on “a misconfiguration issue that prevented authentication components from deploying correctly.”
Millions of Americans rely on Outlook and the broader Microsoft 365 suite for work and daily communication, meaning an outage of this scale can ripple through businesses, schools and government offices that depend on the platform staying online.
