Microsoft Outlook Outage: Is It Fixed Yet, and What Still Works?

Outlook is gradually coming back online across Europe, Japan and North America following a global outage that began on Thursday, November 12, Microsoft says. However, some users are still experiencing intermittent issues, and the company hasn't given a timeline for a full recovery.

The disruption affected Exchange Online, which powers Outlook's work email and calendars. It began around 6:15 pm UTC on Thursday and spread to 74 countries within an hour, according to Downdetector. The outage also affected government services, with South Africa's SARS warning taxpayers and Singapore's IRAS reporting email delivery problem

For users still seeing empty inboxes, Microsoft says it is protecting delayed emails as it works to restore the service.

Has the Microsoft outage been resolved?

Not fully. In its 12:00 pm UTC update, Microsoft said service and email delivery were improving across a growing share of its servers in Europe. It said Japan was comparatively more stable and North America was also improving, though some users may still see problems on and off.

That follows recovery work Microsoft finished on parts of its Asia Pacific servers earlier on Friday. Its latest update doesn't mention other regions, including Africa, and its service health page still lists Microsoft 365 as degraded.

Personal accounts are affected too. In a separate update at 11:55 am UTC, Microsoft said a consumer outage was hitting Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, Microsoft To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web, and that it was still working to pinpoint the source. It said recovery was progressing.

In the meantime, Microsoft has extended its email timeout window to 48 hours. It says this helps protect delayed messages while delivery catches up.

What caused the Microsoft outage today?

Microsoft hasn't named the root cause yet, but it has described what went wrong on its servers.

It said a process on the affected Exchange Online servers that sets up secure connections became overwhelmed, so those servers stopped handling requests. It also said a large number of servers went offline unexpectedly, leaving fewer to carry normal traffic. Some servers Microsoft restarted stopped responding again as traffic returned.

Microsoft says it has no evidence of malicious activity, and it will publish a full post-incident report once the outage is fixed.