Can’t Access Your Outlook Account? Here’s What You Should Know

A major Microsoft outage disrupted businesses and professionals worldwide, leaving users unable to access Outlook, send or receive emails and use several Microsoft 365 services. Some Teams features and Microsoft’s AI assistant, Copilot, were affected as well.

Downdetector recorded a peak of 138,058 Outlook-related complaints at around 11:30 PM IST. Several users reported disruptions lasting more than five hours.

ChatGPT and Claude users experienced problems connecting to Microsoft 365 through their respective connectors.

Microsoft began restoring server capacity in India by Friday morning, but services remained unstable at 09:30 AM IST.

The company said some servers resumed operations after a restart but crashed again when traffic increased. It subsequently began testing a patch on a limited number of machines and reversing recent network changes. These measures helped some users regain access, while others continued to face difficulties.

The disruption initially affected services in the United States and Latin America before Microsoft confirmed that users worldwide could experience problems.

Australia’s government agency Service NSW was affected too, prompting it to ask people to postpone office visits as several transactions could not be processed.

The primary issue involved Exchange Online, Microsoft’s cloud-based email and calendar service that supports Outlook.

Problems with the platform prevented users from accessing inboxes and sending messages reliably.

Microsoft attributed the disruption to a sudden rise in server load and began investigating whether a recent network change had contributed to the incident.

The company said there was no evidence of a cyberattack.

While many users could continue using Teams chats and online meetings, calendar access and meeting scheduling were disrupted.

Copilot struggled to retrieve some work emails, calendars and files because of its dependence on Microsoft 365 services.

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