Microsoft Outlook outage leaves millions without email access

U.S. House, Australian police and Japanese government affected

Microsoft’s Outlook email service went dark for millions of users on Thursday, and the company had restored only “marginal success” by early Friday after more than 12 hours without the service.

Very little is known so far about what is behind the outage. Microsoft has attributed it to an “elevated load,” or servers becoming overstretched, and assured users it was doing everything it could to fix the problem.

“As of now, we are not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident. We will continue to treat this incident with urgency and priority until full resolution,” the company said.

Microsoft did not say how many users were affected. Microsoft 365 apps have around 430 million users globally, and the disruption was not limited to email: the company’s communications platform Teams and its AI chatbot Copilot were also affected.

Downdetector, which tracks cyber outages, recorded problems for users in more than 70 countries. Countries from the U.S. to South Africa to India and New Zealand were affected.

The U.S. House of Representatives said it was also affected, as were the Australian police and the Japanese government. In Hong Kong, bankers told CNN their work was disrupted. Companies including OpenAI and Anthropic were also affected.

The outage reached a wide set of institutions at once. The Japanese government, the U.S. House of Representatives, the Australian police, bankers in Hong Kong and companies including OpenAI and Anthropic were all affected.

Reaction online split between frustration and relief. While some people were fuming, others said they were relishing the opportunity to wind down work early ahead of the weekend.

Social media was full of memes of people slacking off at work or enjoying tranquil scenes without the pinging of a constant barrage of emails, with some telling the Microsoft technicians not to hurry with fixing it.

Microsoft said it was treating the incident with urgency until full resolution, but the company has not disclosed the scope of the impact in user numbers.