[Update] Microsoft Confirms Outlook.com is Currently Down for Some Users

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Microsoft has acknowledged a new issue with its Outlook.com webmail service. The company confirmed on its service health website that the problem is currently preventing many Outlook users from sending, receiving, and searching for emails.

Microsoft explained that the issue started at around 6 AM UTC on Tuesday morning, and it was caused by a recent change in the infrastructure. However, the company has yet to share details about the change that caused this massive disruption. The data on Downdetector indicates that the Outlook outage is primarily affecting customers in North America and some other regions worldwide.

Microsoft detailed on the service health page that users might encounter a 500 error while logging into their Outlook.com email inboxes. The issue also impacts some additional functionalities related to Outlook.com. For instance, the Calendar APIs used by Microsoft Teams and various other Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft Confirms Outlook.com is Currently Down for Some Users

Microsoft Expedites Recovery Efforts for Outlook outage

Microsoft indicates that it has taken necessary measures to restore the Outlook.com webmail service in affected regions. However, Microsoft’s engineers have not provided an estimated time for full restoration.

“We’re applying targeted mitigations to a subset of affected infrastructure and validating that it has mitigated impact. We’re also making traffic optimization efforts to alleviate user impact and expedite recovery,” the company explained.

Last month, Microsoft also acknowledged a major outage that hit several Microsoft cloud services. These include Exchange Online, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Intune, Power BI, and M365 Admin Portal.

Microsoft later published a preliminary post-incident report to reveal that the global outage was triggered by an IP address change on a WAN router. The company has taken a couple of actions to prevent similar incidents in the future. Microsoft plans to publish a final post-incident review report with more details on the investigation in mid-February.

Update 10:41 EST: Microsoft says that Outlook.com is now back up and running in all affected regions.

“We’ve confirmed that the issue is resolved after an extended period of monitoring. Further details can be found under EX512238 and TM512245 in the admin center,” the company announced on Twitter.