Microsoft Outlook outage stretches on for hours

A widespread outage involving Microsoft’s Outlook email and other applications stretched into Friday morning as the company said it was working to restore service.

The tech giant first posted a statement on social media saying it was “investigating reports of users experiencing issues” accessing online mailboxes shortly before 1 p.m. ET Thursday.

Downdetector, which monitors outages, reported issues with Outlook, Teams and other products on Thursday, as Microsoft attempted to deploy several fixes.

The company has been providing updates on steps to resolve the outage on its Microsoft 365 Status social media account, providing a window into the hourslong effort to troubleshoot the disruption.

In a post shortly after 11:30 p.m. ET, the company said it was working on efforts to improve server stability to improve traffic flow.

“We’re observing partial recovery across regions in which we’ve applied these adjustments; however, these actions aren’t resulting in sustained recovery, so we’re reviewing what additional actions we can take to improve overall infrastructure stability,” the post stated.

Earlier in the day, the company said: “We’re aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. We’ve paused all deployments, we’re moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure, and we’re restarting affected servers to return them to service.”

Around 6 p.m. ET Thursday, the company said it was “returning a portion of affected servers to the service, and they remain stable so far,” though later updated that the servers “can become unresponsive again once they receive traffic” and was working on a fix for that.

Earlier, Microsoft also reported some users were experiencing issues with Microsoft Teams. The company shortly updated that “mitigative actions have successfully restored service health and functionality.”

Amid the outage, New York City’s Emergency Management Department warned residents of potential delays in reaching city agencies.

“If you are trying to contact a New York City agency by email or access an online City service that relies on Microsoft systems, you may experience delays or temporary disruptions,” NYC Emergency Management said on social media. “These issues may affect the delivery of emails, responses from City agencies, and access to certain online services.”

For more urgent requests, the city advised residents to try using an alternative method to contact the agency, and to call 311 for non-emergency city services and 911 for emergencies.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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